Variant issue 14

ISSUE

Summer 1993 UK £4.00 US $11.50 CAN $12.50 IR £5.00

VARIANT is a magazine of cross-currents in culture
independent media, critical thinking, imaginative Ideas
and artistic interventions.

VIDEO POSITIVE is Britain's biennial international
lestival of creative video and electronic media art.
This issue of Variant has been edited and produced by
Moviola and is both ISSUE 14 of Variant and the official
catalogue of VIDEO POSITIVE 93.

Moviola,

Bluecoat Chambers,

School Lane.

Liverpool L1 3BX.

UK

Tel: (051) 709 2663

Fax: (051) 707 2150

Guest Editor:

Design, Layout

and Typesetting:

Printing:

Distribution, UK:

USA:

Canada:

Australia:

Helen Cadwallader (Moviola)

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VARIANT is a charitable project which publishes on a
quarterly basis.

Editor: Malcolm Dickson
Editorial Address: 73, Robertson Street,
Glasgow G2 8QD.
tel: (041)221 6380
fax: (041)221 7775

Opinions expressed in this issue of Variant are those of
the writers and not necessarily those of the editor, of
Variant or of Moviola

All material is copyright Moviola, Variant and the writers
(unless otherwise stated).

Subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council, Arts Council of
Great Britain.

ISSN 0-954-8815
ISBN 0-9521221-0-3

Contributors to this issue WRITERS John Byrne is a

lecturer in the history and theory of contemporary visual
culture at Southport College of Art, and is currently
writing a PhD on time based media and the politics of
display Sean Cubitt is a writer, critic and reader in
Video and Media Studies at John Moores University,
Liverpool Jean Fisher is a freelance writer and editor
of the quarterly magazine Third Text Keith Piper is an
artist and writer Dr Sadie Plant is a writer and lecturer
in Cultural Studies at Birmingham University.
Richard Wright is an artist working in electronic media,
a writer and lecturer in Computer Graphics at London
Guildhall University John Wyver is an independent
producer and writer

VISUALS Robert Cook Paula Court Tracey
Mostovoy Kirov Perov, and ZAP Art International

FRONT COVER IMAGE by d i s

Contents

3. Prefaces

4. Soft Future

8. Separate Spaces: a personal perspective on
Black Art and the New Technologies

12 Beyond the Screens: Film, Cyberpunk and
Cyberfeminism

18 Video Art, Identity and the Processes of Cultural
Mapping

22. The Collaboration Programme:
VIDEO POSITIVE 91/93

26. Things That They Do Better Than Us

30. What's Wrong With Video Criticism?

36 Reflections on Echo: sound by women artists in
Britain

42. John Conomos: his work and thoughts on
Australian video practice

VIDEO POSITIVE 93

48 Artist Statements

55. The Collaboration Programme Statements

59. Screening Programmes

64 Performances

one

VIDEO POSITIVE 93 would like to thank:

Moviola Staff (tn alphabetical order)

Kashef Bashlr (Advertising Sales) Eddie Berg (Director) Helen
Cadwallader (ACGB Trainee Curator/Catalogue Editor), Louise
Forshaw (Animaleur). Clive Gillman (Technical Co-ordinator),
Judith Glynne (Administrator). John Mclnally (Marketing and PR
Officer) Rebecca Owen (Festival Projects Coordinator). Martin
Wallace (MITES Co-ordmator)

The Collaboration Programme

Josane Alexander. Diane Clarke, Adam Gill. Sarah Haynes.

Julie Myers. Simon Robertshaw. Colin Weir Jane Wood

Moviola Board Members

Bryan Biggs Colin Broadfoot (Acting Chair), Geotfrey Brown,

Sean Cubltt. Jane Leighton. Chris Meigh-Andrews

and

David Abdullah (Cultural industries Developmeni Officer,
Liverpool City Council). Ken Almond (Almond Jonesl Abdullah
Badwi (Media Development Officer, Liverpool City Council).
Chris Ball (Liverpool Educational Developmeni Centre). Bryan
Biggs (Director, Bluecoal Art Gallery). Lewis Biggs (Curator,
Tate Gallery Liverpool). Jane Blagdon (Audio Visual Techmlion,
Tate Gallery Liverpool) Alison Blease (Press Officer. Tate Gallery
Liverpool) Steven Bode (Director. Film and Video Umbrella).
Simon Bradshaw Colin Broadfoot (Regional Sales Managers.
The Saville Group) Colin Buckley (Learning Methods Branch,
Department of Employment. Sheffield), Mike Burns (Southport
College) Joanne Butterworth (Age Concern St Helens).
Thibauld Catrice (French Cultural Delegation). Rob Cave (St
Helens Arts Resource Project). Phil Coe, Richard Colmer
(Southport College). Kate Corbin. John Cotcher (Principal
Officer. Age Concern St Helens). Maura Cummins (Southport
College) David Curtis (Film and Video Officer, ACGB),
Penelope Curtis (Assistant Curator. Tate Gallery Liverpool).
Beverley Dale Helen Danson (Advertising Manager, Manweb).
Paul Dempsey (St Helens Community College). Malcolm
Dickson (Editor, Variant), Kevin Douglas (Legal Advisor.
Shufflebottoms), Louisa Drysdale Carol Eaton (Albert Dock Co.
Ltd). Gill Ellison (Information Officer. Age Concern St Helens),
Charles Esche (Assistant Curator Exhibitions. Kettles Yard).
Dave Faragher Jane Garrity Michael Gray Dave Green
(Southport College). Peter & Bernard Gudynas (ZAP Art
International), Ian Halfpenny (Southport College). Karen Hanlon,
Dave Hart (Sefton Youth Services). Caroline Hines (Anthony
Fawcett Associates). Ann Heston. Michael Hurst Naomi
Horlock (Educalion Depl, Tate Gallery Liverpool) Rachel Irving
Tony Irving (Sandfield Park Special School), Marine Jacob
Mike Jones (Film and Video Umbrella). Roy Jones (St Helens
Community College), Chris Kennedy (Gallery Manager, Bluecoat
Gallery). Simon Kensdale (Sefton Youth Services), Barry Kirwan
(Merseyside Centre for the Deaf), Irene Kotlarz (Speedy Films),
Chris Lahye (Events Director, Bluecoat Arts Centre). Bob Lane
(Head of External Affairs, Merseyside Development Corporation),
Brian Langer (Director, Australian Video Festival), Jane
Leighton Adele Maddocks (Alntree Youth Centre). Kevin
McLoughlin Mike Mahar (Hire & Conference Manager, The
Saville Group) Kathleen Maitland-Carter Jefferson Maxim
Chris Meigh-Andrews (Lecturer, Art & Fashion, University of
Central Lancashire), Jacqueline Morrissey (Film & Video Officer.
North West Arts Board). Louise Muddle (Unity Theatre). Gerhard
Murjahn (Director, Goethe Institul). Julia Obara Llfnos Owen
Mike Parker (St Helens Community College), Graham Phillips
(Unity Theatre), Ruth Preece (Arts Co ordmaior. Ashworlh
(North) Hospital) Alison Pritchard Phyllis Richardson (St
Helens Arts Resource Projecl), Simon Richey (Asst. Director,
Education, Gulbenkian Foundation). Jane Rigby (Partner, Fields
and Frames) Paul Rogers (Knowsley Community College).
Edwin Rowan Ken Simons (Head Technician, Tate Gallery
Liverpool), Barbara Spicer (Community Officer, Merseyside
Development Corporation), Rod Stoneman (Deputy
Commissioning Editor, Independent Film & Video, Channel Four
TV). Peter Thomas (Knowsley Community College). John
Thomson, Helen Tinner Julian Treuherz (Director. Walker Art
Gallery). Cathy Village (TVEI, Sandwell), St John Walker Mr
Waugh (Headmaster, Holy Trinity School, Southporl), David
Williams (Director. Open Eye Gallery) Graham Williams
(Knowsley Community College), Lesley Williams (Southport
College). Carmen Wills (Women Into Media, SI Helens
Community College), Mike Wilson (Fanuc Robotics). John
Wojowski (General Manager/Programmer, Cinema 051). Tim
Wright (TVEI, Sandwell) and Digital Pictures (London), Fringe
Film and Video Festival (Edinburgh), Glasgow Film and Video
Workshop, independent Sound Services Co Ltd. Jackdaw Media,
London Video Access. Mersey Film and Video, Melro Trans Ad.
New Horizons, North West Disability Arts Forum, Printflne. Shed
Graphics, St Georges Hotel, TEAM, Thorn Lighting Limited.
University of Oxford (Dept of Physiology), University of St
Andrews (Dept of Psychology), Video Access Centre and The
Christie Brothers

Video Positive is supported and sponsored by:

MERSEYSIOE

DEVClOPMSNT CCRPORAIId

CHANNEL rOUB TELEVISION

mires

Subsidised by the
Scottish Arts Council

SERVICE CULTUREL DE L'AMBASSADE DE FRANCE

DELEGATION CULTURE! I F FRANCAISE MANCHESTER

FANUC

Itobotics
C K Commodore

Video Positive 93 is presented by Moviola in association with Tate Gallery
Liverpool, Bluecoat, Open Eye Gallery. Walker Art Gallery and Unity Theatre.

BLUECOa t

page

Editor's Preface

As a special edition of Variant, this year's VIDEO POSITIVE
Catalogue aims to maintain the critical and challenging
editorial remit established by this publication. The articles
commissioned here cover a broad range of issues and
subiects which in some instances may not comply with
what one might immediately define as fine-art 'moving-
image' production. But any attempt to define this area of
practice is anomalous, comprised as it is of a
heterogeneous and diverse range of formats and different
practices from the combination of science and technology
to broadcast media and film. By focusing on these different
strands and by drawing on cultural theories and discourses
the aim here has been to open up this area of practice in
terms of the cultural sphere, that is on the level of meaning,
issues and ideology

Through referencing cyberfeminism and cyberpunk in
Beyond the Screens...', the writer and theoretician. Sadie
Plant analyses advanced technologies and how these are
articulated in the cultural realm in order to radically
challenge our assumptions that such technological formats
represent the domain of patriarchy, of the white, rational
male. The confusions governing the relationship between
art and science, between culture and technology are
critically challenged posing little more than a 'Soft Future',
as argued by electronic media artist Richard Wright In
Separate Spaces' the artist Keith Piper charts the use of
technologies by contemporary Black Artists alongside the
development of his own practice, to reiterate the
challenging perspectives presented by Black practitioners
working in Britain today in spite of often being denied
equality of access. This issue of access is raised in 'The
Collaboration Programme Interview', an initiative which
provides a range of community and education groups with
the opportunity to express their viewpoints. The question of

whose voice is traditionally privileged within the
museum/art-gallery exhibition context is addressed by
John Byrne in Video Art, Identity and the Processes of
Cultural Mapping'. By referencing this revisionist argument,
Byrne argues for a form of moving-image cultural
production that can re-work the 'very economy of seeing'
Similarly, Sean Cubitt asks the question 'What's Wrong
With Video Criticism?' to raise observations which are
relevant to moving-image practice in general. Indeed the
term moving-image' is itself misleading since it neglects
the very real issue of the sound-track: how this is explored
and what it can represent in terms of the various subject-
positions offered the viewer/listener. These are some of the
issues raised by Jean Fisher in her re-working of her
previously commissioned article, Reflections on Echo -
sound by women artists in Britain'. How moving-image
practice can survive and be developed is addressed by
John Wyver in his manifesto-style piece 'Things They Do
Better Than Us', analysing the differences between Britain
and the rest of Europe in the commissioning of public-
broadcasting fine-art based projects. Finally, the
importance of funding structures and how these can
influence a practice is addressed in 'John Conomos: his
work and thoughts on Australian video practice' an
interview by Brian Langer

I'd like to thank the writers for contributing articles which I
hope you'll find are both informative and polemical,
discursive and challenging, contributing towards a
stimulating and perhaps controversial debate. My thanks
also extend to Malcolm Dickson, the editor of Variant
magazine, for his invaluable support and advice.

Helen Cadwallader, March 1993. VIDEO POSITIVE 93
Catalogue Editor.

Director ' s Preface

Two factors have underpinned the development of the
third Video Positive festival. Firstly, our commitment to
increase the scope and range of events and activities
supporting the installation programme and secondly, and
equally importantly, our aim to provide greater
opportunities for regional participation through an
expanded programme of activities within communities
and education Happily, in both, I believe we've
succeeded.

The structure of VIDEO POSITIVE 93 differs significantly
from the first two manifestations. A dedicated festival
period from May 1-9 contains more than 40 different
events, performances, screenings and seminars, each
illuminating and engaging with different and diverse
formal, aesthetic and technical concerns of artists and
makers. The installation programme, sited at Liverpool's
four premier galleries, has been extended from Its
previous exhibition period of two weeks to run for the
whole month of May

One of our aims this year is to satisfy more clearly and
cohesively the needs of a professional audience and that
of wider interest groups. Seminars dealing with critical
concerns of students and new artists are presented
alongside specialist events for curators and exhibition

organisers. Talks and workshops lend weight to what
must surely be the largest survey of creative video and
electronic media art ever presented in the UK. Of course
we're committed to developing the widest possible
audience for the festival and - with an extended exhibition
period - we hope to increase substantially on the number
visitors who attended VIDEO POSITIVE 91 .

The continued development of the festival and of
Moviola, Ihe organisation responsible for running it, in a
climate and culture of near economic despair within the
UK is a testament to the faith and foresight of many of our
funders, the Arts Council of Great Britain, North West Arts
Board and Liverpool City Council being key among them.
Without the substantial support of these three
organisations in particular, and the generous
contributions from many other sources in general, the
festival could not even attempt to match the scale and
scope of many of its European counterparts.

With the visitor being offered more choice, more
challenges, more often, I hope you will find VIDEO
POSITIVE 93 fascinating, even frustrating, but always
entertaining.

Eddie Berg. March 1993. VIDEO POSITIVE Director.

Press Enter by Peter Gudynas (Zap Art International)

Soft
Future

by

Richard

Wright

Close your eyes. Now, imagine a world,
the world of the future, What do you see?

Will you see a technological Utopia, a city
of gleaming metal spires, orbiting
spacecraft, a world spared from nuclear
annihilation and united by a common belief
in the benefits of rational progress?
Nowadays, probably not. At most your
vision is likely to be an end to recession,
economic stability for at least a while, a
new order of grey suited bureaucracy.
Perhaps you see nothing at all, just a hazy
mist of half forgotten ideals. But when I
close my own eyes there is still something
there lurking in the background, like a
memory chopped up into disparate
fragments. It coagulates, forming a surface
- it is the surface of a computer screen.

Technology was the collective vision of the future in the
West for quite some time. Now technology in Its most
virulent form as electronic media still tries to keep our
beliefs about the future alive, by recreating them as
images. With my mind's eye, I can see pictures
pro|ected on the screen inside my head. They are
special effects movies. Terminator 2. Robocop and The
Lawnmower Man, they are computer games, they are
documentaries on virtual reality - and they are from the
future. Media events seem to have become the
repository ol our ideas about what the luture would be
like, but their function is not just to represent those
ideas, to symbolise a set of goals which are being
actively pursued, but to actually become the future
itself. For the construction of sensational scenes of
fighting robots, space flight and mind expansion, use of
the most advanced digital imaging technologies are
necessary. Each new movie feels compelled to outdo
previous efforts in the seamless surety of its effects.
Every transformation must be shot full frame, without
any cause for the viewer to claim sleight-of-hand; it
must be utterly convincing, making any suspension of
disbelief quite unnecessary. Technologically mediated
narratives of 'the future' are used to construct the
contemporary perceptions of technology itself. This
perpetual and constantly re-invented future is
represented today by imagery generated by modern
computer technology like mathematical visualisations,
scientific graphics, digital effects and animations of
virtual environments full of 'images beyond
imagination'.^ Technology has become a shadow cast
by the future onto the present.

But behind this screen of media technology lies a sense
of loss. It is the loss of what Jean-Francois Lyotard
called the grand narratives' of the West, in particular
the enlightenment dream of rational progress. None of
the Utopian predictions of the past seem to have been
fulfilled, there is no universal peace based on the
impartiality of scientific thinking, no achievement of the
leisure society, and the new generation has been
described as the first to be economically worse off than
their parents were. Science no longer delivers, and
media presents just a memory of the future. Instead of
trying to build a better tomorrow, we now use the latest
media technology to simulate visions of the future in
music videos and special effects films much more
efficiently than having to change the world itself This is
not a hard future of imposing architectures and hurtling
spaceships, but a soft future of media extravaganzas
and digital effects, existing synthetically on the screen.
The result is that we are living in a requiem for a future
that never was. played by a virtual future that always is.

The ideal of continual progress has degenerated into
that of constant novelty and distraction. Technology
today has to struggle hard to keep up with the
expectations that people have of it, always having to
surprise them with something new. The imaging
technologies needed to produce the effects in science
fiction films are often more advanced than the state of
the technology they seek to imitate, as though it is more
important to see what an advance in technology would
be like than for it to actually exist. It is not that science
has ceased to grow and expand but that the areas in
which we expected it to succeed and change our lives
for the better seemed to have been deflected onto other
paths.

The more that new media offers us in terms of creative
potential and technical agency, the more that they
become their own subject Consider virtual reality
technologies as the ultimate means of giving complete
form to the full extent of the human imagination When
we look around us to see the results of their applications
we see interactive games about more technological
subject matter - giant battling robots, star fighters,
mutant experiments - the creation ol a world in image
form that has otherwise proven too costly to achieve.
Technology enters discourse not as fact, but to provide
evidence of its own myth Its hypothetical repercussions
are as misplaced as discussions of the social impact of
space travel' were in the '60s as though it were already
an everyday event. Now that the promise of manned
space flight to alien worlds has receded. NASA
attempts to keep the magic alive by developing virtual
exploration such as the 'telepresence' system. This
remote sensing and control apparatus allows a user
based on earth to experience the sights and sounds
received by a robot that may be operating millions of
miles away in deep space or on other planets. An
interactive 'movie' created out of data accumulated by
the Viking One has also been used to simulate a flight
over the landscape of the planet Mars. This surrogate
astronautics can be enjoyed in a consumer version by
anyone with a home computer and a laserdisc player as
though it is a video game. As well as visible
phenomena, synthetic imagery can also be used to
represent other astrophysical events such as magnetic
fields and interstellar combustion as travel scenefy
Thus we see the latest technology working hard to
prevent the glamour of space science from fading

Computers are advancing, in order to process more
information, to generate more effects. Bereft of any
humanitarian ideals, technological determinism is left to
pursue increasing functionality and a spiralling
extrapolation of its specifications. The goal for the
electronic media artist is assumed to be that of
increasing quantities of tools for more and more
minutely controlled manipulations of the image. The
range and diversity of functions for computer aided art
and design work has multiplied to the extent that it
outstrips our outmoded notions of creativity as aesthetic
inventiveness. The insistence of this goal of unlimited
expressive power seems to be an opportunity for the
computer to display its features and abilities and invite
our admiration, regardless of whether they meet a pre-
existing artistic demand. The correct vehicle for this
panorama of technical conquests is the showreel, the
superlative form of state-of-the-art posturing.

No matter what technical potential a new medium
promises, it must connect with a current cultural
practice in order to be taken up by a community and
exploited. This inevitably results in many of its
expressive abilities being constrained or completely
ignored because they are not relevant to the needs of a
certain group. But a Western industrial society operating
under the pressure of continual technical progress
introduces a conflict into this situation. As more is
always assumed to be better, it is assumed that the
more technical features and options that a device
provides the more it constitutes an advance on what
has gone before. In the field of art and design this
becomes a strategy of marketing computer media as
providing a range of expressive means far beyond what
was possible with 'traditional' media, even though many
functions may have no obvious application. It is

considered up to the artist's boundless creativity to find
interesting things for the new equipment to do. This
highlights a fundamental contradiction at work In
contemporary Western thinking. On the one hand there
is a fiction based on the rational perfectibility of the
material world through technical agency and an
increasing of information exchange. This is manifested
in the history of art as the modernist project of continual
aesthetic innovation and increase in formal devices. But
on the other hand are the operation of cultural practices
as constructions restricting the use of knowledge and
materials to within parameters considered relevant to its
concerns, usually defined in historical and sociological
terms?

When art Is industrialised under the modernist rubric,
the equation is biased towards greater expansion of the
means of production for its own sake Artistic creativity
is judged to be an Insatiable beast that cares only for
the next stylistic advance or fashion through which it
can excrete some ready made 'content' The future of
art is required to settle into the form of an unbroken
stream of new expressive facilities. Thus the world of
tomorrow is constantly pre-empted by the latest
technological commodities and brought forward into
today. The idea of the future as a place in time has been
eradicated and replaced by the future as an attitude of
mind embodied in a business strategy.

But the cultural reaction to this new futurology has been
to undermine it by using it to reconstitute the past. Look
at the explosion of references to science fiction
periodicals and serials of the Fifties and Sixties that
have occurred in contemporary media and advertising.
If modernism has insisted on a logic of progress
towards the ultimate explication of form, then
postmodernism disrupts this by placing the project Into
a space outside the one way march into the future and
leaves it circling aimlessly but frantically fabricating new
styles and effects. The past of Dan Dare, Robbie the
Robot and Astonishing Tales resurfaces as a memory of
a future of arrogant optimism and coercive submission
to technological imperialist ideals The absurd machines
of Heath Robinson from the '20s and '30s are
recreated as computer animations that lament our belief
in the value of scientific improvements to domestic life.
In the original film Terminator, the murderous robot thai
comes from the future dresses as a leather clad
motorcycle hoodlum. In the sequel Terminator II, the first
robot returns as the hero protecting us from the new T-
1000 robot that can take on any identity and seems
impervious to force Through T-1000, we experience a
future which can take on a variety of threatening forms,
as a trusted law enforcement agent or even as our own
mother. We find we are now more inclined to trust the
original terminator cyborg, still dressed as the romantic
biker anti-hero of the past, coming on like the young
Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. But we need not
entirely reject the liquid steel cyborg of Terminator II,
remembering that James Cameron unfairly chose not to
show us that the robot could just as easily have turned
itself into the Schwarzenegger cyborg if it wanted. For
the appearance of a uncertain future also frees us from
the obligation to follow failed solutions.

Living without a future, the electronic image has
become not a window onto an external tomorrow, but a
mental projection Like Freud's dream image, it is a
screen on which we can interpret the signs of our
desires and anxieties. But the computed image is not

read like the convenient symbolisms of a single
inscribed idea or belief. It is a soft image,
impressionable, amorphous and badly behaved, like the
id of rationalism's ego. It contains the unconscious of
technology, in which we find the roots of half
submerged yearnings for new beginnings. Just as
digital imaging allows the image in the cinema film to be
transformed and recreated into any future world that is
currently desired, so the trajectory of modern progress
is deflected from its original course into a number of
alternative scenarios.

Digital technology has no form - look at your computers,
they are all the same. They have no mechanical parts,
they are just boxes of tiny silicon cubes They are
becoming smaller, they are becoming invisible Soon
they will disappear from the real world altogether and
will exist only through the images they project. This
technology does not act, it evokes. It can implant the
images of hidden desires in our brains, there to grow
and germinate.

The logic of technological determinism is now
threatened with its imminent fall from grace as the future
is replaced by the image, the soft image. This tolerance
of the digital erodes the relentless historical surge of
fundamentalisms towards their belief in their inevitable
triumph The prestaged conformist future of art can be
compelled to yield by its dissolution in the very sea of
images that had advertised its success. That media
technology has no form of its own means that its
appropriation by any power group can always be
challenged.

When the human imagination tries to exercise its powers
today it can find itself limited by current state-of-the-art
technology. For our powers to conceive of new ideas
and situations seem constricted to produce solutions in
terms of technological developments rather than trying
to think of a new social strategy or political force to
replace the disappointments of the last decade. But this
technological colonisation of the imagination provides a
collision point from which a new stimulus can direct
scientific advancement. Deprived of a clear vision of the
future to work towards, the researchers at the 'blue sky'
Californian science parks wrack their brains to find new
challenges for their intellectual might They must be put
to sleep and learn to dream their own dreams until they
can live without the comfort of the future. Remember the
science fiction writers hired by the US military to brain
storm ideas for new weapons and who came up with the
Star Wars system of space borne laser guns. Mow that
the dissolution of the evil empire has removed the logic
of that one-dimensional race for hardware supremacy,
what can the science fiction writers offer us in the soft
future? Our crystal ball is a video framestore and its
pixels are already energising in response to our
thoughts.

Primordial Dance by Karl Sims (Thinking Machines Corp) 1991

Through the digital image, society has started to dream
again. The dream is a land beyond time - it can fit a
whole lifetime of possibilities into the duration of a single
night. Its future cannot be charted or planned; it is
fuzzy, soft. A world without a future is a world of dreams.
When we look into the computer screen we see the
dreams of technology unfolding. But now they can be
dreams which we can interpret to form our own lives.

Close your eyes

Footnotes

1. Imaglna Conference. Monte Carlo, France, 1992.

Richard Wright is currently researching a book on the cultural
and scientific implications of electronic visualisation

VIDEO POSITIVE is hosting two seminars to discuss some of the
above issues 'Computer Media, in at the Deep End?' mil be held
at 2pm on 5.5.93 at Tate Gallery Liverpool 'Big Science, Big Art
will be held at 2pm on 75.93 at Tate Gallery Liverpool.

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Separate
Spa ces

personal per spec t i ve
black art and the new
technologies by
Ke i th Piper

'The perspective through which no art activity by black people is seen to be possible outside
the boundaries of their own specific cultural traditions in Asia, Africa and/or the Caribbean, is
based solely on an assumption the full meaning of which can only be grasped within the
context of the prevailing attitude of this society towards its non-white populations',
Rasheed Araeen, 'The Art Britain Really Ignores'.^

The 1976 publication of Naseem Khan's now infamous
report. 'The Art Britain Ignores', left a whole series of
fissures which have proceeded to shape and distort the
cultural, economic and technological parameters within
and against which Black Artists have been compelled to
operate Within the report, Khan critically questioned
'Ethnic Art' as a term which contextualised the activities
of 'non-white' artists within the confines of the traditional
or 'heritage' art forms of their particular 'ethnic'
backgrounds 'Non-white' artists were, In effect,
debarred from the possibility of making any innovative
intervention into the realm of contemporary mainstream
practice. It also highlighted the implausibility of the
'Third World' ethnic artist' being able to meaningfully
interact with the explicitly 'first world' arena of the new
electronic media and technologies.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties, as the term
Black Art' began to seep into contemporary artspeak, it
is of little surprise that its most vocal advocates were
continually at pains to stress its diametric opposition not
only to the apolitical indulgences of art for art's sake',
but also to the traditionalist, conservative 'craftiness' of
so called ethnic art'. This opposition to the traditional
hand crafted object motivated the initial development of
a technology centred practice on the part of a range of
Black Artists in the early Eighties. When one key figure.
Eddie Chambers 2 put down the paint brush with which
he painted sections of the Union Jack with Swastikas in
his Destruction ot the NF (1979-80) in favour of the
photocopying machine, by doing so he was engaging in
a process through which the technologies of instant low
cost photomechanical image duplication were being
brought to the centre stage in the contest over what
could be seen to constitute not just Black Art', but in

fact contemporary British art practice.

Within these terms, the photocopy was utilised as the
most efficient means of reprocessing and representing
photo-journalistic images in a highly politicised and
didactic context, rather than for any aesthetic or anti-
craft shock-value reasons. As a strategy, this was in line
with the declared aims of many artists working at this
time. From an article by Chambers entitled, 'Black
Artists for Uhuru' published in 1983, we read that. 'Black
art. at the very least, should indicate, and/or document
change. It should seek to effect such change by aiming
to help create an alternative set of values necessary for
better living. . . ' 3

A number of Black Artists from this period and earlier,
and in isolation from each other, were also utilising
photo-mechanical reproductive technologies to produce
work which, in part, mirrored the didactic aims outlined
by Chambers. Artists such as Chila Burman in pieces
such as her Militant Women (1982) and Gavin Jantjes
in his anti-Apartheid screen prints exhibited at the
Edward Totah Gallery in 1980, both utilised the
expanding interface between conventional printmaking
and these new photo reproductive technologies to
explore and discuss contemporary political issues.

During this period of the early to mid-Eighties, Black
Artists also took up technological formats such as
photography and film, as witnessed in the significant
achievements of Black British film-makers working in the
independent and workshop sector, such as Isaac
Julien It is almost impossible to regard these as
discrete and separate areas of practice as artists clearly
utilised a mixture of different mediums.

It is againsl this background of a relatively broad
based and multi-faceted engagement with areas of
technology based practice by British based Black
Artists that my own transition into - and orientation
within - the area must be viewed.

During the early Eighties, a cauldron of political
ideologies and rhetoric - gleaned from sources as
geographically diverse as the writings of the '60s
Black American activists such as Malcolm X and
George Jackson, the Black nationalist and Afrocentric
lyrics of Jamaican reggae musicians, and the home
grown barricade poetry of a riot torn and flaming
urban Britain - all combined to evoke a highly didactic
set of creative sensibilities on the pari of (largely male)
Black visual Artists. Influenced by such sources, my
own work of this period employed a range of
strategies incorporating the use of traditional art
materials, canvas and paint, hand written text, multi-
media sculptural elements and image reprographic
technologies such as photography, photo silk-screen
and photocopies as a means to articulate content
Throughout the mid-Eighties this strategy of collaging
together different elements expanded from the two-
dimensional to the three-dimensional in the use of
installation-based strategies. These developments ran
concurrent with a growing interest in integrating
technology based elements in installation practice.
Tape, slide and film loop began lo play an increasing
role, whilst sound became the medium through which
any texl based content of a piece was voiced,
supplanting the unwieldly dependence on hand
written and printed text which had characterised
earlier work.

Far from being an excursion into a culturally and
technologically alien domain, this use of recorded
sound and acoustic based technologies had a
familiarity which, in itself, begins to raise interesting
questions. This point reveals aspects of the multi-
faceted relationship between race, class and gender
on the one hand, and technology on the other,
untouched by fixed notions of 'ethnicity' and cultural
practice.

During the '70s, many of us working class black
teenagers, myself included, had been drawn towards
the cultural and recreational space which surrounded
the so called 'Sound System'. The Sound System
comprised of over-powered amplifiers driving
oversized loudspeakers in hand built cabinets,
catering to the unique demands of reggae music. An
obsessive fetishism around the power of amplification
combined with the complex networking and
juxtaposing of mulliple speakers became our key area
of expertise. As the technology offered increasingly
diverse ways of manipulating and interacting with the
received cultural product, the record (not only through
the Disc-Jockey's voice-over, but also through an
expanding array of equalisers, syn-drums, complex
sound generators, reverb and echo units), so our
fascination with the manipulative and regenerative
power of technology expanded.

Such youth culture involvement provided an initial

engagement with technology based practice which
eventually resurfaced Ihrough the interests and
creative orientation of a number of Black Artists. One
such artist is Trevor Mathison. who having passed
through a formal Fine Art training, re-engaged with his
interest in the use and manipulation of sound by
developing innovative and highly characteristic 'sound
landscapes' in his sound-track work for the films of the
Black Audio Film Collective, of which he is a long-term
member Gary Stewart, similarly trained, developed
an interest in hand built electronic sound manipulation
devices and in the computer based MIDI technology.
This in turn led to expertise in the various creative
applications of the Apple Macintosh range of
computers which has been put to good use in
developing Artec's London-based 'Multi-Media
Workshop' as a centre for innovative electronic image
production, where he is currently based.

Although my own teenage involvement in audio
technology was relatively basic in comparison, it was
to resurface in my installation work of the mid to late
Eighties. In August 1987, I used multi-track sound
combined with a four projector dissolve sequence in
Adventures Close to Home, (exhibited at Pentonville
Gallery) which examined the shifting boundaries of
excessive policing: or combined as part of a 'scratch'
video displayed across seven television sets in
Another Empire State shown at Battersea Art Centre in
September of the same year. This explored some of
the links between British capital and Apartheid.

What characterised these projects in terms of content,
was a growing theoretical distance from (he didactic
language of political certainty which had
characterised earlier work. Although centring their
point of locus upon the examination and exploration of
specific social and political issues, the work
deliberately avoided a prescriptive diatribe based on
any pre-formed political ideology. Instead, the work
was content to reference and juxtapose fragments of
information, allowing the spectator to work around a
multiple set of potential readings.

In a real sense this re-positioning concurred with a
wider set of trends current in the work of Black Artists
during this period. The aggressive confrontationalist'
mode of utterance which had been favoured, largely
by young male artists in the early Eighties, had been
supplanted by a more reflective 'invitational' mode of
address characteristic of Black women's work
Concurrent with this shift was a greater emphasis
upon the historical continuity of Black resistance,
which often expressed itself through a sense of
pictorial and aesthetic nostalgia by which artists
strove to re-acknowledge the political and cultural
achievements of Iheir parents generation.

At first glance, this development appears to drift
dangerously close to the old formulas of 'ethnic art'
but within the particular technologies employed by
those artists and the particular political resonances
evoked, a whole complex of reflective readings - each
one pertinent to conlemporary sensibilities - came to
be generated.

Within my own practice, technologies such as
photography, lape slide and audio multi-tracking were
employed to construct work which referenced imagery
and sounds from a multiplicity of historical and
contemporary sources and re-|uxtaposed them,
opening up a range of sometimes ambiguous and
contradictory readings. It was, however, only through
a growing involvement with the use of computer
based technologies, that such aesthetic aims could
be more comprehensively explored.

My first encounter with Commodore's Amiga computer
came in about 1988. It was a period during which the
high cost of the Apple Macintosh range proved
inhibitive whilst the publicity surrounding the Amiga
500 appeared to offer a versatile and affordable tool
for use in a creative environment, although this
potential has yet to be completely fulfilled due to the
promotion of the Amiga as 'games machine 1 . In spite
of these anomalies, the Amiga has come to occupy
centre stage within my working environment. In terms
of sound, the '8-bit' samples which the basic machine
was capable of manipulating have remained horribly
muffled, but offer the scope to construct quite
complex collages of fragments of voice and other
textures of sound, providing the 'cross-referentiality'
sought within what I perceive to be the new creative
agendas. It is interesting, at this point, to draw a direct
comparison between this interest in the collaging and
cross referencing of sound within Black Art practice
and the more highly developed arena of contemporary
Rap and House music from which many of us drew
Influences.

The music Of Public Enemy the Jungle Brothers or
more recently Arrested Development, is also
characterised by an eclectic collaging of information
from a disparate range of sources which are then
juxtapositioned within a dominant text. Such features
also co-exist with a cacophony of sub and counter
texts, some of which remain haunting, others are
simply deeply contradictory.

Called Jesus, held at the Ikon Gallery. Birmingham in
January 1991. More significantly, this exhibition
included a three monitor video-installation featuring
animated Amiga images.

These animations were made by exploiting the
Amiga's ability to flick through a series of 4096 colour
images (on a basic 'un-accelerated' machine) at
about 8 to 12 frames per second coupled with the
relative simplicity of encoding these animations onto a
PAL video signal and then recording this to video.
Subsequent animations were produced on Amigas
which were upgraded in terms of memory and speed
with installed Genlocks. This allowed a longer
sequence of frames to be looped enabling them to be
flicked through at greater speed which helped off-set
the inherently poor resolution of the images. This
development meant that animated sequences could
be superimposed over sequences drawn from other
computer or video sources. I have used these
particular methods of animated computer montage in
multi-monitor video installations produced for
exhibitions such as PhotoVideo organised by
Impressions Gallery, York in 1991. This was a four
monitor piece entitled Tagging the Other which
explored issues concerning race, nationality,
technologies of social monitoring and the 'New
Europe'. I have produced installations exploring other
themes such as Black masculinity in exhibitions from
Rochdale to Holland.

It is within the context of this body of animated
computer montage that a piece such as Trade Winds
explores issues of shipping and trading legacies
through the use of a dislocated animated black body
spread across an arrangement of four monitors, each
set in its own crate. The full range of ideas around
notions of collaging, of juxtapositioning, of dominant
and sub-text, of cultural and historical referencing, of
layers of ambiguous and sometimes contradictory
readings, as discussed in this article, are also present
in this installation Trade Winds.

It is these particular characteristics of Rap music
which I have attempted to construct in my computer
based visual arts practice. The Amiga had the ability
to sample, or 'digitise' images from any video source
into a file of manageable size and up to (a currently
unimpressive but at that time very exciting) 4096+
colours and to collage those images together using
electronic paint-box tools. This technology provided
the visual equivalent of Rap music's collaged layers of
sampled sounds. The biggest difficulty with using the
Amiga in this way, lay in the mechanical problem of
getting a usable image out of the machine. The first
solution involved simply pointing a still camera at the
computer screen. I first used this rather low-tech
method to collage imagery together for a tape-slide
piece exploring the marketing of black masculinity In
an exhibition entitled Black Markets, held at
Cornerhouse, Manchester in September 1990 A
similar method was used, but this time outputting to
slides as well as colour stills which were then
reprocessed on a colour photocopier, in various
contexts in a series of installations entitled A Ship

The interface between the work of Black Artists in
Britain and the arenas of new technology and
electronic media is complex and constantly evolving.
Black Artists who are often denied equality of access,
in comparison with their white counterparts, to the
relatively resource-dependant field of cutting-edge
creative technology have, nevertheless, prioritised the
integration of computer based and electronic media in
their practice. It is this ongoing commitment to the
tools of modernity, whilst retaining a commitment to
the discussion of issues of contemporary relevance,
which effectively derails any residual attempts to
consign Black Artists to the ghetto of 'ethnic art'.

Footnotes

1. Rasheed Araeen. The Art Britain Really Ignores', Making
Myself Visible. Kala Press. London. 1984 p 101.

2. Rasheed Araeen, 'The Emergence of Black Consciousness
in Contemporary Art in Britain'. The Essential Black Art, The
Chisenhale Gallery (London), 1980 p 6.

3. Eddie Chambers. Black Artists tor Uhuru'. Moz-Art
Magazine. March-July 1983, p 34

Is Technology encoded in masculine terms?

Technology is a masculine thing. II is usually taught by
men. It has a thirty year rule, a legacy of male dominated
training right from primary schools to Masters Degrees.
The last decade has seen more women study
technological subjects, therefore, it will be another twenty
years before an equilibrium; and that's being optimistic!
Lei Cox, Artist and Lecturer at The Scottish School of Film
and Television and VIDEO POSITIVE 93 Artist.

Is video technology 'encoded in masculine terms', this is
an old argument. First of all it assumes that men and
women have nothing in common and secondly, that the
language of technology is fixed and immutable. It is not.
Like any other language, technology is subject to social,
economic and cultural forces as well as the irreducible
and irrepressible force of the human spirits that
manipulate it. But women are resourceful individuals in
spite of limited support, it is impossible to silence their
voices and suppress their vision. What really matters is
that our work is shown, that it exists and stands as a
challenge to the mainstream both on television and in an
art gallery context.
Catherine Elwes. Artist.

Technology should not be confused with language.
Although language is encoded in gender specific terms,
technology is a significantly more ambiguous and
contradictory element. All good art subverts technology.
Michael Maziere. Director ot London Video Access.

If one considers terminology such as 'terminate', abort',
'kill' and 'execute' as gendered, then one would agree
that these terms could be seen as masculine; as such it is
unsurprising that as an artist, one is most likely to come
across these terms in the 'size-is-everything' cyberstudio
of 3D graphics/animation. The problem facing many
women (and some men) accessing cyberspace' has less
to do with its encoding than in the (actual) environment in
which one gains access. The production process of a
piece of work that does not necessarily embrace the
latest, fastest, most powerful machinery can be readily
condemned as lightweight by computer bullies un-
concerned with content. Women working with new media,
in general, are less in love with the technology than what
it can do for them; with 'information inflation' a relentless
reality, it is an irreverence that could be well emulated
elsewhere.

Susan Collins. Arlist, currently Research Fellow in
Interactive Media, West Surrey College of Art and Design.

II technology and video in particular is thought to be
encoded in masculine terms, there are liberating
moments when it dances to other tunes. There is work
which layers images and texts together, which
rhythmically repeats itself, and which is shown in ambient
installations. These challenges to a masculinist linear form
are increasingly the province of men as much as women!
Angela Kingston, Exhibitions Officer, Ikon Gallery.

Beyond the
Screens ,

Film, Cyberpunk
and cyberfeminisi

by Sadie PLant

I would rather be a cybo

than a godde ss.' 1

(Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto)

So would I.

Machines and women have al least one thing in
common: ihey are not men In this they are not alone,
but they do have a special association, and with recent
developments in information technology, the
relationship between women and machinery begins to
evolve into a dangerous alliance Silicon and women's
liberation track each other's development.

The beginnings of this convergence can be heard in
the tekno beat of rave music, read in the up-tempo
pages of cyberpunk fiction, from both male writers, like
William Gibson and Greg Bear, and women writers,
such as Pat Cadigan and Octavia Butler, and seen in
films from Robocop to Until the End ol the World It is
the process by which the world becomes female, and
so post-human (

Cyberfeminism is information technology as a lluid
attack, an onslaught on human agency and the solidity
ol identity Its flows breach the boundaries between
man and machine. Introducing systems of control
whose complexity overwhelms the human masters of
history. Secreted in culture, its future begins to come up
on the screen, downloaded virally Into a present still
striving, with increasing desperation, to live in the past.
Cyberfeminism is simply the acknowledgement that
patriarchy Is doomed No one is making it happen: if is
not a political project, and has neither theory nor
practice, no goals and no principles. It has
nevertheless begun, and manifests itself as an alien
invasion a program which is already running beyond
the human

The 'connection between women and technology has
been sedimented in patriarchal myth machines were
female because they were mere things on which men
worked; because they always had an element of
unpredictability and tended to go wrong, break down
No matter how sophisticated, the machine is still nature,
and therefore understood to be lacking in all the
attributes of the man: agency, autonomy, self-
awareness, the ability to make history and transform the
world. Women, nature and machines have existed for
the benefit of man, organisms and devices intended for
the service of a history to which they are merely the
footnotes. The text itself is patriarchy, the system within
which women occupy a world of objects, owned by
men and exchanged between them. After Oedipus, the
connection between castration and blindness, the penis
and sight, seals the fate of woman within the phallic
organisation of a specular economy for which she is the
sold as seen As the French feminist theoretician, Luce
Ingaray suggests, this is a strategy which has meant
that there is only one human species, and it is male:
homo sapiens. There are no other sapiens. Woman is a
virtual reality.

Women, however, have always found ways of
circumventing the dominant systems of communication
which have marginalised their own speech And while
man gazed out. looking for the truth, and reflecting on
himself, women have never depended on what appears
before them. On the contrary, they have persisted in
communicating with each other and their environment
in ways which the patriarch has been unable to
comprehend, and so has often been interpreted as
mad, or hysterical Now these lines of communication
between women, long repressed, are returning in a
technological form. Hypertext destroys linearity,
allowing the user to enter the density of writing, and

disrupting every conception of the straightforward
narrative. The immediacy of women's communion with
each other, the flashes of intuitive exchange, and the
non-hierarchical systems which women have
established in the networking practices of grass roots
feminist organisations: all these become the instant
access of telecommunication, the decentered circuits
and dispersed networks of information. The screens of
cinematic and televisual experience become touch
sensitive, transforming the gaze and collapsing its
vision into the tactile worlds of virtual reality

When Freud named weaving as woman's sole
achievement, a remnant of the veiling of her own desire,
it had been automated for more than a century.
Jacquard's loom was the first step to software, a vital
moment in the development of the cybernetic machine.
Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, said of
Babbage's Analytic Engine: it 'weaves algebraical
patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and
leaves' 2 Today the American photographer Esther
Parada writes: '/ like to think of the computer as an
electronic loom strung with a matrix image, into which I
can weave other material.. . I hope to create an
equivalent to Guatemalan textiles, in which elaborate
embroidery plays against the woven pattern of the
cloth.' 3 With digitalisation, weaving no longer screens
woman's desire, but allows it to flow in the dense
tapestries and complex depth of the computer image.
The data streams and information flows of cybernetic
machines are the transformation and return of sensuality
and the extra-sensory perceptions denied by the
rational speculations of human history.

Enlightenment history dreams of a world of its own
design and institutes man as the privileged agent of
change: the world must be answerable to him, and
wherever possible, it is he who must be seen to be
making it happen. In his ideal world, he really would be
running the whole show, master of all he surveys; in the
late Twentieth Century, this is the show which begins to
go out of control In spite of every attempt at
domestication, the agents of history have now to
contend with runaway economies, overheating
atmospheres, computers which can beat them at chess,
and gun-toting women like Thelma and Louise. These
are occasions for regret to those nostalgic for the days
when planning and mastery seemed unproblematic
They are also symptoms of an emerging cybernetic
environment which, as Donna Haraway suggests in her
Cyborg Manifesto, allow us to learn 'how not to be a
Man. the embodiment of Western Logos. 4

There is no doubt that the wares of technology, hard
and soft, old and new, are always intended as toys for
the boys: technical development has always been a
consequence of man's attempt to perpetuate and
extend his dominion. This is the basis of many feminist
critiques of technology, which is said to be developed
without and against women, and used only as an
extension of masculine power. And it is all true: fuelled
by dreams of light and flight, the machinery which feeds
into the cultural images of the late Twentieth Century
has its roots in a struggle against nature which has also
been the repression of the feminine; a drive for security
inscribed in the militarisation of the planet. As Virilio
points out, cinema has always been a spin-off from
war 5 ; video, High Definition TV and virtual reality are

equally the after-images of the weapons and
surveillance systems, networks of communications and
intelligence developed for use in advanced theatres of
war like the Persian Gulf.

Yet it is these technologies, the pinnacles of man's
supremacy, the high-tide of his speculations, that leave
his world vulnerable to cyberfeminist infection. Hooked
up to the screens and jacked into decks, man becomes
the user, the addict, who can no longer insist on his
sovereign autonomy and separation from nature.
Increasingly integrated with the environment from which
he always considered himself distinguished, he finds
himself travelling on networks he didn't even know
existed, and entering spaces in which his conceptions
of reality and identity are destroyed. This is the return of
the repressed, the return of the feminine, perhaps even
the revenge of nature. But that which returns is
transformed: no longer passive and inert, nature has
become an intelligent machine, a self-regulating
system. Nature was always the matrix it becomes: once
the passive womb, a space for man; now weaving itself
on the integrated circuit.

One only has to glance at the back cover of a
cyberpunk novel to get the gist of the world produced
by this dynamic. Pat Cadigan's Synners 'plunges us into
a fast-moving, high-tech future - exotic, exciting and
very dangerous. It's a world where new technology
spawns new crime even before it hits the streets. A
world where computer viruses appear all but human. A
world where new drugs are the order of the day - every
day. A world where the human mind and the external
landscape have fused to the point that reality is
constantly being moulded, destroyed then re-created. . . '.

Cyberpunk has precursors in Ballard's myths of the
near future and the drug-infused cut-ups of Burroughs.
techniques which collide with the anarcho-libertarian
politics and streetwise mania of punk. Populated by
self-designing systems and artificial intelligences,
simulated identities and cyborgs, metaverses and
cyberspaces, terminals and consoles, prosthetic limbs
and the complexities of computer generation,
microbiological life, and self-guiding systems,
cyberpunk takes the shopping malls, cities, climatic
changes, computer networks, designer drugs, viruses,
multinationals, hackers, and outlaws of the present into
a future in which reality becomes a simulated program,
and identity a transient manifestation in cyberspace.
Cyberpunk is like a free port, a grid reference for free
experimentation, an atmosphere in which there are no
barriers, no restrictions on how far it is possible to go...

Not that one has to go too far before things start getting
weird Cyberpunk's future is no longer an horizon in
endless recession, but even now surges into the
present. Released from distant galaxies, its aliens are
already ensconced in our midst; its women are brave
and insidious, drawing strength from their difference to
humanity and their very alienation from human society,
rather than any desire to play a full role within it.
Convinced that the technological destruction of the
human condition leads not to futureshocked zombies
but to hopeful monsters', 6 cyberpunk is not afraid to
take us through to the other side of the screen, to
experiments with the vision of the alien, the perspective
of the inhuman.

Cyberpunk does nothing to persuade us that the world
it describes is a good world, a better world, a desirable
world at all. From the perspective of a socialist or
humanist feminism, its fictions are dystopian visions ol a
future gone wrong; a world for which the revolution
never happened. While cyberpunk is often detested tor
this realism, an increasing number of feminist critics
see the possibilities of cyberpunk, in the distance its
women have travelled from the days when nurture and
passivity were the charms of the science fiction heroine.
Joan Gordon applauds the tact that more women are
writing cyberpunk fictions: 7 tor one am not convinced
that I am an earth mother. What else might I be? II
science fiction can show what it means to be lemale in
the world toward which we hurtle, I want to read it. ' 7

Entoverse by Peter Gudynas (Zap Arl International)

Cyberpunk has been writing the software, but popular
film has proved itself one of the leading media lor the
display of cyborgs, virtual worlds, and other cybernetic
leaps. The technologies it represents begin to exceed
the medium of film itself: Wim Wenders can use HDTV,
but The Lawnmower Man can only show filmic
representations of VR, not simply because technology
of the quality displayed in the film has yet to be
developed, but also because even in its earliest and
crudest forms, virtual reality brings the user into a
space beyond the screens of the cinematic form

It is not film, however, but the stories in which it
continues to frame these technologies which are
obsolete. Unlike cyberpunk, most films dealing with
information technology tend to dress it in tales of gods
and forefathers, man's search for power, immortality,
and self-discovery. These are traditional narratives
which make every effort to place the most alien of
technologies in the most comfortable and reassuring of
contexts, to read the future in terms of the past
Christianity confronts cyberspace in The Lawnmower
Man, the drive for law and order meets the cyborg in
Robocop and countless other cyborg thrillers. Not
surprisingly, the feminine is always the weak link in
these patrilineal chains. Until the End of the World treats
us to a display of female vulnerability to the seductions
of a machine intended to reinforce family values. In Eve
of Destruction, a dangerous female cyborg threatens
revenge on man and gets her kicks from orgasmic car
crashes rather than the male body.

Nevertheless, because of the simplicity of their stories,
these films often relate the most telling of tales. In Eve
ol Destruction, a cyborg, Eve VIII, is developed as a
lethal military machine by the US government. In
appearance and psychological make up, she is a
sophisticated simulation of the scientist who created
her Caught up in a bank raid on her first trial run, she
escapes the control of the military institution for which
she was designed, buys a red leather jacket and a
more than adequate supply of heavy duty weapons.

Eve VIII is a cyborg, a simulation of the feminine and
the ultimate male paranoia trip. She is, as the colonel
hired to kill her says, a machine without a lucking off-
switch', and can only be terminated with an accurate
bullet through the eye In conversation with Eve
Simmons, the scientist whose achievement Eve VIII is.
he gives voice to a revealing technophobia Admitting
he's the perfect military man, he makes his own
antipathy to technology clear 'Don't get me wrong', he

says. I'm not some righl wing extremist I just think we
should show a little more backbone when dealing with
some ol the evils ol this world Like international
terrorism, tor example Also, junk mail, automatic tellers,
and cars that talk back to you. ' For the colonel, these
phenomena clearly have a definite connection with the
decline of civilisation

Eve VIM is equipped with a nuclear device in the neck of
her womb, the void already veiled by the woven screens
of virtual technology If the cyborg is still, like Freud's
woman, nowhere to be seen, this is only because of the
possibility of a blinding flash of annihilation unleashed
by her military programming As a simulation of her
creator, the cyborg is also guided by the scientist's
memories, dreams, and desires, and when Eve VIII
gams her freedom, she begins to enact the scientist's
sexual fantasies with a ridiculous bravery. As she
watches the cyborgs revenge on her own repression.
Eve Simmons says: She's doing things I might think
about doing but would never be courageous enough to
do'

The film ends with a return to family values, with the
scientist forced to choose her human child over her
cyborg sister. But the message is clear women and
machines make a disastrous combination. Everything
goes wrong: the machinery breaks down and the
women can't cope. Women who become too integrated
with technology either become dangerous weapons,
built against women, but turned against man, or they go
mad, like the woman in Until the End ot the World, who
becomes addicted to replays of her own unconscious.
Either way, the convergence of machine and the
repressed unconscious of woman make a threatening
alliance The message is that it's all best left to the boys
Popular film perpetuates the myth, but also puts it on
display, a declaration of the importance of keeping
women and technology apart.

These films are developments of older stories about
mad women and female replicants which provided films
like Bladerunner and Metropolis with their central
themes, already shifting patriarchal fears of the wildness
and unpredictability of nature to the dangers of the
cybernetic machine.

Although most popular film which deals with information
technology is less adventurous than cyberpunk fiction,
tekno films are now released into a zone already
mapped by cyberpunk. Like Robocop and Terminator,
they begin to experiment with machine vision and delve
into the cyberpunk worlds of virtual spaces and
cybernetic organisms. These are films in which
machinery is no longer simply on the screen: scenarios
in which humanity itself is under observation from an
alien, inhuman perspective Just as woman escapes her
role as spectacular glamour on the silver screen and
starts making her own films, recording her own vision,
so technology begins to assume a gaze of its own

The cinematic screen is no longer the simple surface on
which man projects his own self-image and the images
that will sustain it Neither are the screens which
patriarchy has erected around its own history any longer
secure, the filters with which it has kept out the aliens,
the visions and messages, and all the messiness of the
world which might throw it off course The cyborg s
vision is simply a screen on which reality is displayed.

revealing the possibility that human perception is itself a
mechanism which accepts its pixelled vision as reality,
just as the cyborg knows only its screen When
simulated realities themselves find their way into
popular film, as in The Lawnmower Man and. more
subtly, films like Total Recall and Videodrome, they
further storm the reality studio if reality can be
simulated, even the screen disappears The stability of
the real is no longer simply confused by a multiplicity of
screens, but by its integration with the very mechanisms
of perception The surfaces grow dense the screens
crack up. and it is no longer possible to distinguish
between actual and virtual realities

Virtual reality: the simulation of space, the pixelled
manifestation of another zone. Bought on the street. VR
is still crude cyberspace is too jerky and as yet. the
programmes are self-contained and overdetermined
Even within these limits, the VR machine begins to allow
its users to choose their disguises and assume
alternative identities: would madam like blue eyes or
brown, round ears or pointed ones?' Enthusiasts
celebrate this diversity as a liberation from necessity,
and off-the-shelf identity is an exciting new adventure
for the user of virtual reality. Women, who know all about
disguise, are already familiar with this trip. Imitation and
artifice, make-up and pretence: they have been role-
playing for millennia: always exhorted to act like a
woman', to be ladylike'; always to be like something,
but never to be anything in particular, least of all herself
There is as yet no such thing as being a real woman. To
be truly human is to be a real man Woman does not yet
exist . except as she appears on the set: wife and
mother, sister and daughter: always performing duties,
keeping up appearances, the acting head of the
household.

Women have of course been roped into the patriarchal
privileging of identity, so that much feminist struggle has
been devoted to the search for the true self, the missing
ingredient which would give women a full and equal
place in human society Cyberfemininity is something
quite different It is not a subiect lacking an identity, but
a virtual reality, whose identity is a mere tactic of
infiltration VR is a disturbance of human identity far
more profound than pointed ears, or even gender
bending, or becoming a sentient octopus. Those who
believe these to be the limits of its impact are duped by
dissimulation and the present state of its development.
Cyberspace certainly tempts its users with the ultimate
fulfilment of the patriarchal dream, leaving the proper
body behind and Moating in the immaterial. But who is
adrift in the data stream? All identity is lost in the matrix,
where man does not achieve pure consciousness, final
autonomy, but disappears on the matrix, his boundaries
collapsed in the cybernetic net. Like women, all
technologies have to be camouflaged as toys for the
boys, and virtual reality is itself an alien in disguise.

The cyborg is also undercover: as Robocop. it
masquerades as the vanguard of human security, the
more real man, the military machine But even this figure
is already an inhuman mutation; neither man, machine,
nor even man becoming machine, the cybernetic
organism is itself a symptom of cyberfemmist invasion,
the introduction of the cybernetic system to even the
most sacrosanct of organisms: the human This
destruction of the human identity boundary is also the
vanguard of attempts to secure its dominion The

muscular cyborgs of popular film are creatures of law
enforcement, security, policing, and surveillance;
deployed, like Eve VIII, to safeguard the values and
interests of human security, this is a mission they
accomplish only by complicating control and
proliferating chaos, disrupting secufity in the very
process of reinforcing it The cyborg betrays every
patriarchal illusion, dragging the human into an alien
future in which all its systems of security are powerless
This is the runaway auto-immunity of a humanity that is
no longer itself; the frontier of patriarchy's automated
defence networks has already become cybernetic, and
so female. Even the Robocop heroes of a generation
are already cut-ups of man and machine, intruders from
virtual posthumanity The cores of identity become the
ones and zeros ot a digital printout; the programming is
revealed, the camouflage is slipping away. 'To become
the cyborg, lo put on the seductive and dangerous
cybernetic space like a garment, is to put on the
female.' 8 If the male human is the only human, the
female cyborg is the only cyborg Things look different
from the other side of the screen

The cyborg informs the patriarch that his drive for
domination has led not to the perfection of techniques
for ordering the world, but to cybernetics; self-designing
mechanisms, self-organising systems, self-replicating
machines Because they seemed to give reality to the
dream of total control, early self-regulating functions
were hailed as marvellous additions to man's armoury in
the struggle for dominion. Now nature was so tamed
that it would run like clockwork. But the perfection ot
clockwork is also the phase transition to automation, the
point at which machines began to exceed the control of
those who believe themselves to be in charge. The
Jacquard loom already marked the migration of control
beyond both the human and the mechanical to a new
software site in which machinery begins to learn and
explore its own circuits of positive feedback.

Just as the mechanical shaped the cultures in which it
arose, so the cybernetic extends beyond particular
instances of technological development, feeding into
the study of any complex system and leading even to
the view that nature itself is a cybernetic organism, a
self-regulating system of which man is merely a
function This marks a fundamental shift in conceptions
of history: a move away from linear development, and a
return of the cyclical, now transformed into circuitry
With this comes the possibility that man Is not in control
of his own destiny, and never will be. His drive for
domination, control, and systematisation has brought
him only to the realisation that domination is impossible,
and that his agency was always only a mystified sub-
routine in a larger system of control. Technical research
and development is increasingly aimed at the re-
establishment of human control, the rehabilitation of the
machine, but drives for security only defeat their own
purpose. Every new computer virus which hacks
through the filters of data protection means only more
software, the proliferation of new codes, the proliferation
and mutation of viruses. The same fear expressed in
Eve of Destruction: systems with no off-switch.

This transition to the cybernetic can still seem safely
distant and fantastic Cyborgs, virtual realities, and the
cyberspatial integrated net are the tropes ot science
fiction. Nevertheless, as Donna Haraway points out, 'the
boundary between science fiction and social reality is

an optical illusion',® and it is cyberpunk's shift of
perspective which collapses this distinction to insist that
the future is already here Humanity is living out the last
days ol the spectacle, the last phase of illusion.
Cyberfeminism is the process by which its story is
racing to an end. Every attempt to heighten security,
and erect the protective screens again, merely perfects
its circuits Cyberspace shifts reality into the virtual; the
cyborg embraces identity collapse; technosecurity
evolves under the guidance of a virtual systems crash.
For all our good Intentions, moral principles, and
political vision, we are heading for a post-human world,
in which the intentions of the human species are no
longer the guiding lorce of global development.

Every effort to build a world of man's own design has
resulted only in the development of a planetary network
with its own networks of communication, circuits of
control, and flows of information With the development
of self-regulating systems, man has finally made nature
work, but now it no longer works for him. It is as though
humanity was simply the means by which the global
system, the matrix, built itself; as if history was merely
the prehistory of cyberfeminism.

At the time of writing. NASA is beginning the most
ambitious attempt to receive messages from outer
space It may well hear from something, but the alien
transmissions will not necessarily be from another
planet. And if their sources do turn out to be little and
green, we can be pretty sure that they won't be men.

A version of this paper was first presented af the Ikon Gallery,
Birmingham, during the EIGHTH BIRMINGHAM INTERNATIONAL
FILM AND TELEVISION FESTIVAL. October 1992

Footnotes

1. Donna Haraway. A Cyborg Manifesto', Simians. Cyborgs and
Women The Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books.
London, 1991.

2. Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines. MIT.
London and Cambridge Ma. 1991. p 164.

3. Trisha Ziff, Taking new ideas back to the old world talking to
Esther Parada, Hector Mendez Caratini and Pedro Meyer', in
Paul Wombell, ed. Photovideo: Photography in the Age ot the
Computer. Rivers Oram Press. London. 1991, p 131

4. A Cyborg Manifesto' op cit. p 173

5. Paul Vinlo. War and Cinema, Verso. London. 1989

6. Bruce Sterling, in Veronica Holllnger. 'Cybernetic
Deconstructions Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.' Larry
McCaffrey, ed. Storming the Reality Studio. Duke Univ Press.
Durham and London. 1991. p 206

7. Joan Gordon. 'Ying and Yang Duke it Out'. Storming the Reality
Studio, ibid, p 200

8. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, 'Will the Real Body Please Stand
Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures'. Michael
Benedict, Cyberspace. First Steps. MIT, 1991. p 109

9. 'A Cyborg Manifesto', op cit, p 149.

Sadie Plant has /ust published The Most Radical Gesture: the
Situationist International in a Post Modern Age fRoutledge. 1992)
and 'Beyond the Spectacle: the matrix of drugs and computers'
(Routledgej forthcoming

VIDEO POSITIVE is hosting a seminar Short Circuiting the
System: Gender and Technology' to discuss some of the above
issues at 2pm on 1 5.93 at Tare Gallery Liverpool

I

Descry by Judith Go-ddard 199?

/

Video

Art

Identity

and THE

Processes

of

cul tural

Mapping

by

John

Byrrne

In his article 'The Necessity Of Doing Away With Video
Art'^ John Wyver argued that the video age has
heralded a new era within which previously distinct'
communications industries have converged. Within this
(presumably postmodern?) era of boundary blurring,
Wyver argues for the disposal of any notion of video art.
One of the main reasons he gives for this is the notion
thai video art is now defined by its own self-
perpetuating 'superstructure' of production and
dispersal. Put simply. Wyver sees as problematic the
continued existence of a tyrannical network of
exhibitions, festivals and curatorial practices which
originally developed to establish video's supposed
artistic integrity, but which now survives only to be fed
with more of the same old stuff.

For Wyver to criticise the poverty of medium-specific
cultural production is one thing, to propose a notion of
doing away with video art is another. Such an action
would, I believe, merely deprive us of a potentially
valuable tool of cultural self-criticism whilst, at the same
time, altering nothing.

Traditionally speaking, image making practices have, in
our society, been taken as an indicative barometer of
the social, economic and political circumstances in
which they were produced. If this is so then 'art', at
best, can only provide us with new ways of seeing and
perceiving the 'world out there'. However, an alternative
to such passive conceptions of visual culture have
been offered in the work of writers such as Raymond
Williams In his book Culture 2 for example, Williams
argued for a general reappraisal of creative practices
as sites of cultural activity, or battlegrounds, through
which societies struggle to impose dominant points of
view, and within which new meanings are themselves
generated. Given this, 'video art' not only offers a
unique opportunity to look at how we are structured
through language and communication industries, it also
provides the possibility to challenge certain processes
of selectivity which not only underpin the 'art' world, but
which govern our role as individuals within capitalist
society.

One such dominant process within our society
concerns the accepted notion that individual works of
art can be collected, organised and exhibited in terms
of authorial intent, as individual examples of their
makers' creative genius. There is an imbalance in this
which is both racial and gendered given the almost
complete dominance in our galleries of individual
geniuses who happen to be western, white and male
The individuals who currently go to make up our
dominant canon of artistic excellence are not chosen on
merit alone. So how are we to address such an obvious
imbalance?

The first step is to argue, as it has been over the last
decade or so, that 'art' is not produced by the individual
'author' at all, rather that it is the result of varied social
processes which reach far beyond the interventionist
role of any individual curator, critic or funding body
'Art', therefore, can be seen as a historically specific
and socially created term of identification which is
encoded to its roots with assumptions about the role
and function of gender, race and class identities.
Identifying the point at which some of our society's
more dearly held myths are generated is one thing, but
altering them is another.

Certainly, to propose any notion that art' is not
physically produced by individual human beings will be
lustifiably met with scorn. Nor is any strategy of
anonymous exhibitions a tenable alternative. The
uninitiated viewer needs, at the very least, some
indication of where a particular installation begins and
another one ends, and organising exhibition spaces in
terms of named individuals would seem as good a way
of doing this as any The question of authorship is not
simply about who made what and when, it is about a set
of criteria - a cultural template if you like - which enables
decisions to be made within our society over who
counts' as an arlist' and who doesn't.

Current selective practices act both as an index of what
individualism means' in our society, and as an
Indication of how these 'meanings' affect relations of
gender, race and class But simply filling up a gallery
space wilh a more 'equal' share of gendered and
ethnically specific work will not alter anything, and
although a contradictorially superficial improvement,
such 'tokenism' of this or any kind cannot be avoided
until the very 'meanings' and processes by which
certain objects are allowed to function as 'art' within our
society are radically altered. This, in turn, would
necessitate a critical emphasis on work which explored
the function of electronic media in the construction and
proliferation of existing gender, race and class identities
and their relationship to Eurocentric and phallocentric
ideals of individualism

The urgency of this task within our present cultural
climate cannot be underestimated In Britain, we are still
reeling from the legacy of the Thatcherite era The
broader ideologies of the '80s' boom played upon a
particularly insidious version of 'individuality' which was
defined largely by self-interest. 'Identity' became the
means by which the individual could prove the
successful pursuit of self-interest through the outward
display of recognisable consumer goods. The familiar
two-tier society of the haves and have-nots was
confused further through an unprecedented level of
social display. Paradoxically, the idea of confirming
one's 'identity' through a display of wealth and social
difference was carefully filtered through the uniformity of
the international designer label. This sameness in
difference', this access to a synthetic and manufactured
identity which placates even the poorest strata of
society with the advertising promise that their burgers
and soft drinks will taste the same the world over, has
begun to run amok. Arguments, however interesting,
over whether or not this unprecedented boundary
blurring constitutes a new postmodern' era will, I fear,
provide little more than testimony to the inadequacy of a
single individual' word or theory to stand for anything
much these days. The sooner the inadequacy of
'individualism' as a template by which to represent the
true diversity of cultural difference' is realised, the
sooner we can start as a society (atomised as it is) to
build upon notions of community.

One such work which fundamentally challenges
accepted notions of individualism in the VIDEO
POSITIVE 93 festival is Simon Robertshaw s interactive
installation The Observatory Whilst working with
psychiatric and special care patients In hospitals, half-
way houses and day centres. Robertshaw became
aware of how their identity', or rather lack of 'identity',
was constructed in and through the languages and
discourses of medical science'. As a result.

Robertshaw has given us a work which forces us to
become involved in a reciprocal discourse with images,
notions and traditions of the body. The piece is in no
way didactic Nor will a close reading of the work be
rewarded with a more thorough understanding of
Robertshaw's own individual point of view. We find
ourselves in a shifting and prismatic experience of
historical and contemporary images and constructs of
the human body. From ghostly etched glass images of
human incarceration and DNA codes, to a projected CT
scan of a child's head which Is constantly in a robotic
process of structuring and re-structuring Itself, we are
left in no doubt that these are more than mere records
of our physical existence They are historical documents
which talk across us in a constant dialogue which is
responsible for our own self image as the image of a
healthy' body - a body politic whose measure is the
white western male descendant of Leonardo s Vitruvian
Man. However, this is not a representation of our own
construction through surveillance Rather, Robertshaw
accepts Foucault's term 'the gaze' in order to implicate
our complicity in this complex of representations. In
doing so, The Observatory reminds us of our
responsibility to reject any simplistic notion that we are
being objectively observed by an amoral and well'
meaning 'science'

Themes of the individual, the body and its construction
through a history of commodity exchange and global
capitalist circulation have also recently been the theme
of Keith Piper s video installation Trade Winds. Through
a series of twelve crates, clustered into three groups of
four thereby signifying the compass divisions of our
maps, Piper traces a fragmented, conflicting and
thoroughly materialist critique of black identity within
existing capitalist economic structures. A shifting
intertextuality of animated computer montages tests the
inadequacy of a mono-racial cultural equation which
has constantly failed to accept the cultural diversity of a
truly multi-racial 'identity' As a result, the viewer moves
from box to box. packaged Commodity to packaged
commodity, to be embroiled in a 'process' in which
dominant Eurocentric myths of black identity are
fundamentally challenged.

In Judith Goddards installation Descry, we are
reminded that the very process of 'looking' itself must
be separated from those ideologies which would reduce
It to a biological or physiological function. From
Alberti's Fifteenth Century treatise on perspective to
contemporary biological textbooks, processes of vision
have been represented by a singular diagrammatic eye
which constantly looks out 3 There is never any
indication lhal Ihis act of looking is part of a broader
process through which the viewer's Identity is
constructed. Rather, the individual viewer is
represented as fixed, unproblematic and ahistorical.
The eye voyeuristically devours the world out there on
the individual's own terms. Goddard's work, however,
re-invokes the true complexity of the visual process.
Seven screens, seven different registers of experience,
are converged through a suspended lens onto a single
monitor. Here an eye operation is taking place. The
physical intervention of hand and scalpel into the line of
sight reminds us that the process of looking can never
be reduced to a relationship between single object and
single viewer The space across which vision occurs is
always marked by the traces and manipulations of
others. To experience the visual, then, is to experience
the social.

In order to make sense of the modern world, or to
communicate about it, we are forced to use a set ol
discursive conventions which privilege the private
experience ol the 'individual' viewer. This Is the
fundamental 'myth' which must by challenged. For.
in our society, the 'individual' is found to be an
idealised construct which is built in the image of the
white western male

In the light of this, the work which is undertaken
through The Collaboration Programme in VIDEO
POSITIVE, providing community groups with the
means by which to represent themselves, cannot be
underestimated. Such opportunities reach far
beyond the 'gable end' culture of community murals
and, instead, provide these groups with a much
needed means of self-assertion What is more, video
provides an available currency with which to
challenge the more normative representations which
are made for them by public and private media
agencies. As with the installations of Robertshaw
and Piper, these protects move beyond the ideology
of expressive artist and public audience. They
provide a platform through which the experience of
self-identity is built across a polyphonous network of
mutually determining ideologies. The result of this is
a critical narrowing down of the space between
'spectator' and spectacle' which not only conditions
our intended responses to art, but which are the
dominant relations of 'privilege' and 'otherness'
within our society -

The Observatory by Simon Robertshaw. 1992

It is because of the possibilities that such work
provides, and the challenge it presents to a
comfortable and otherwise 'systemised' gallery
experience, that I believe there is a strong case (to
paraphrase Wyver) for 'the necessity of doing Video
Art'.

If galleries are a place in which the dominant
ideologies of our society are imaged and
expressed, they are also an arena in which
dominant processes of visual consumption can be
challenged The work that needs to be done goes
far beyond the telling of a story, the uncovering of
some pre-existing truth. The challenge is for us to
re-construct the very economy of seeing, and the
contributory role of many diverse and specific
voices which go to make up this experience. The
power of an international televisual experience to
provide us with rich and rewarding moving image
culture is not in dispute: its uncritical power to
replicate out-dated notions of experience and
identity through the manoeuvenngs of global
corporate capitalism are. I am not arguing for a
critical re-production of dominant ideologies. Our
society has a long established track record of
surviving public revelations of the 'truth' about itself
The hegemonic processes at work as we enter the
new technological millenium are far too complex for
that. Rather, I would argue for a moving image
culture in which more people are Introduced to the
possibility of 'producing' their own image and
identity, have access to the processes and
procedures which enable this, and are consciously
involved in what I believe should be the day to day
process of democratically 'constructing' our societal
environment.

Footnotes

1 John Wyver, The Necessity ot Doing Away With Video Art'.
LVA Catalogue, London Video Access Limited, London. 1991

2. Raymond Williams. Culture. Fontana Press. Glasgow. 1981

3. The ideological problematic of the 'Albertian eye' is addressed
in 'The Gaze and the Glance; chapter five of Norman Bryson's
challenging work 'Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze'.
Macmillan Press, London. 1991

Sllanl View Merseyside Cenlte loi Ihe Deal

The
Collaboration

Programme :

Video

Positive

91/93

1991 saw the first Community and
Education Programme and Projects set up
as part of the VIDEO POSITIVE festival.
Eight groups from across the Merseyside
region participated. Now retitled The
Collaboration Programme, this scheme
aims to encourage the participation of
groups in the community and education
sectors to produce electronic media art-
works (single tapes or installations).
Funded through a variety of sources, this
Moviola initiated scheme aims to present
the expression of regional views and voices
which otherwise may not be heard or seen.
The current scheme has collaborated with
twelve groups to produce eight installations
and four single tape works on show as part
of VIDEO POSITIVE 93. Here, Helen
Cadwallader discusses this scheme with
Louise Forshaw (VIDEO POSITIVE 93
Animateur).

Helen Cadwallader - What is The Collaboration
Programme?

Louise Forshaw Formerly named Community and
Education Programme and Projects identified and set
up by Eddie Berg (Moviola, Liverpool) in 1990, The
Collaboration Programme is designed to create
opportunities which provide access to training with
skilled practitioners, and equipment provision where
necessary, to work in a collaborative process and
express ideas within either a single or multi-channel
format, tape or installation. Throughout the programme
innovative video production is encouraged and projects
are developed with an emphasis on new initiatives
under an equal opportunities policy. During 1990/91 the
Community and Education Programme and Projects
was further developed by the then Animateur, Simon
Robertshaw, with myself, as second Animateur.

What does the title The Collaboration Programme
mean to you?

I believe the valuable and thought provoking work
being initiated and produced in what is termed
community or educational settings should -
contradictorially - exist free from titles which
compartmentalise them in a way which demeans their
social context. This is why I felt it necessary to re-name
the scheme. In the occasionally patronising art
establishment, I have witnessed a tendency to regard
work produced under the title of community as 'not
quite art' - more like some pleasant little time-filler
initiative and not to be taken too seriously. This concept
is consistently challenged by the results of projects set
up within The Collaboration Programme. I also believe
there is a definite need to more aptly describe the very
nature of this way of working: it's not about placing an
artist within a group of individuals in order for them to
experience and facilitate the production of the artist's
work. The very crux of this work is collaboration
between a group of individuals.

The point I'd like to stress for the benefit of people who
are totally new to this type of work and this method of
working, is that it's important to work with both the
group's individual, and collectively shared ideas at the
earliest stage in the process. It is only by identifying
through discussion what 'subject' or 'theme' is to be
central can the project then develop. By this I also
mean discussing and selecting whether the
audio/visual course to be followed encompasses live
action, animation, video found footage, computer
generated imagery, figurative, abstract, narrative, non-
narrative and so on and so forth. Only then have you
arrived at an important basis from which to progress.
The next stage is sharing your skills as a practitioner
with the participants, to enable them to express their
ideas to the best of their ability.

There are three things that you've mentioned. One is
that you're concerned with the groups being in
control of the content and the ideas. Secondly,
you've foreground the issue of visual literacy rather

than being caught up in the standardised codes and
conventions of televisual narratives. In addition
such a concern with collective working procedures
which clearly underpins the conception and
development of The Collaboration Programme.
reminds me of the philosophy which informed the
early community arts movement when it was a
radical and innovative phenomena. One fairly recent
definition of this more radical orientation in
community arts practice, an historical strand all too
often forgotten about, is cited by Owen Kelly who
observes '..Community arts involves people on a
collective basis, encourages the use of a collective
statement but does not neglect individual
development or the need for individual expression.
Community art proposes the use of art to effect
social change. ..and developing the understanding
and use of established systems of communication
and change. It also uses art forms to enjoy and
develop people's particular cultural heritages.'^

I think such a definition is a very positive reflection of
what community art has achieved in the past and in
many ways, though less overtly, continues to achieve
However, the very fact I felt the need to re-name the
Community and Education Programme and Projects is
In itself indicative of how community arts have been
ghettoised. Also, it's an interesting observation lhat
some of the student groups have deliberately chosen to
remain apolitical, which I think is a sign ot the limes.

which is dominant in the minds of a lot of people. But
then there really is little one can do about this.

Should it be the case that collaboratively based
projects be viewed in a gallery space without
knowing the biographical details of the artist in
terms of sex, race or whether an object has been
individually or collectively authored?

A painter friend of mine mentioned a show he'd seen in
New York recently - a show of established' artists where
the works were exhibited with no names or details
attached. I liked this idea. I en|oy coming across a
piece of work in an unexpected place. It's the nearest
you get to stumbling across a revelation in the natural
world as a child So maybe the future exhibition of The
Collaboration Programme works would be combined
with and stand alongside the established' artists' works.

There is an argument I disagree with, of having to
forewarn' one's audience before they encounter this
type of work due to the production values and so on
being of a lower standard because of the level of
funding available. It seems to suggest that should the
work have the opportunity of being produced on
Betacam SP with Harry' as a condiment, it would
suddenly be viewed in a different light, more equal to
that of the commissioned artists. I believe a strong idea
communicates its message through any format, whilst a
weak idea cannot be hidden in digital effects.

Of course it can be slightly disappointing if and when I
recognise a germ of an idea coming through the
discussion which I would personally develop, only to
see it cast away in the sea of ideas which you inevitably
have from a group of people engaged in discourse. But
I do not actively direct the collaboration groups on this
issue.

Is it a long-term aim of the VIDEO POSITIVE festival
to challenge and change the way in which exhibits
are categorised?

I don't honestly have a completely formulated answer
for this as VIDEO POSITIVE is a festival which could
develop long term in a great many ways, dependant on
which bodies were involved in the structuring process I
can say I personally hope VIDEO POSITIVE continues to
grow, assess and re-assess, opening up further
opportunities and debate in this area

I think in the future the name of the festival could
change The fact is that a great many of Ihe works
produced no longer simply use video as the main form
of communication This situation overlooks a great
variety of art practices. As a result, II seems
inappropriate to call some of the work video installation
The misconceptions this can lead to was brought home
to me recently when I was discussing this year's festival
with a youth worker who asked 'are there going to be
tellies surrounded by things this year?' This comment
reminds me how easy it is to become blind to the
established image of the high priest of the living room'

However, one cannot ignore the quality of moving
images which a broadcast television audience have
come to expect due to high production values seen in
commercials for instance. It is with this in mind that I
would recommend, in an ideal world, one has the
opportunity to provide The Collaboration Programme
participants with training on the highest quality
equipment and formats. But this of course relies on far
more funding and positive responses from potential
sponsors.

This point is interesting in that it highlights one of
the rationales which finally underpinned the
community arts movement as it developed in the
'70s and for which that movement has been
retrospectively criticised, i.e. that process is all
important over and beyond the final product. But
what you seem to be saying is that both aspects are
equally important, that a good quality art production
is as important as encouraging a good working
process, of encouraging a critical visual literacy.

Ideally. I would work with groups to develop those
critical skills and their ideas and have the added option
of choosing any format or production standard which is
most appropriate to what it is they want to express.

So what are the skills levels of the groups when you
come to work with them?

It varies It depends on which groups have been
approached You can go from people who haven't used

a video camera in their lives before, to those people
who are reasonably skilled but have until then been
taught traditional drama/documentary/news gathering
approach to video and electronic media It's important
to have a fairly broad spectrum.

How are these
approached?

groups and practitioners

I wanted to encourage a wider range of practitioners to
participale in The Collaboration Programme. On this
subject, I would like to say how pleased I am to have
been able to invite such a marvellous group of people
onto the programme. The current team of practitioners
are all positive, dynamic and expressive people of
generous spirits.

There are over one hundred and thirty participants
including staff throughoul the twelve projects, which is
quite an achievement for an organisation the size of
Moviola But I'd like to stress It's not about head
counting, it's about opportunity. Of course when
something is growing you can't get everything right,
otherwise you'd be learning nothing But I think it's
important to recognise that this programme has only
been possible in 1993 due to the hard work,
commitment and willingness of Moviola to listen to and
encourage the implementation and support of different
ideas.

Regarding Ihe projects. I've specifically encouraged the
Age Concern project because I firmly believe education
and creative expression should be open to all. Often,
even within an equal opportunities framework, there can
be a tendency to overlook the elderly.

So the rationale of providing opportunities obviously
informs the way in which groups are approached
and encouraged to be involved.

Very much so. With a group such as Silentview. who are
working with Adam Gill, I recognised a distinct lack of
opportunities in this area and wanted to do something
about it. I remember North East Media Training Centre
(Pelaw, Tyne and Wear) once ran sound recording
courses for the deaf. II set me to thinking how one
consideration I always impress upon participants is how
sound and vision should be treated with equal
consideration. Even when you are aiming for no audio
track as such, the work should reach as near silence as
one can achieve. As this principle applies to the hearing
or partially hearing world only, so I wanted to encourage
other people who obviously have a different experience
of lhe world to use this as a platform In some way.

How much do the projects change as individuals
participate in group projects?

A good example of this can again be drawn from '91
when the St Helens Women Into Media group produced
The Magical Mystery Tour Strictly speaking, to me, this
title didn't completely fit' the installation at its
completion, as they chose the name in the early
planning stages But it reflected perfectly the kind of
process, this incredible journey, a process of working
togelher in a way they'd never done before. So that
when they presented the installation itself it was as if
they'd finally arrived. This is what it's like for everyone
involved, myself included

Where do you see The Collaboration Programme
going?

When I was conducting Ihe initial research and
equipment introduction with the Age Concern group, it
just made my day when Mary Watkinson, a participant,
said 'This is good because we'll be able to use our own
camera when we get one. ' The fact she was learning a
new skill and looking to the future meanl a lot to me.
Also, to see the interaction and mutual interest between
generations with the involvement of Parr Community
High School, is positive in a time when press and media
coverage would have us believe otherwise.

I'd like to see The Collaboration Programme develop
into a constant, ever present set up, with an Animateur
in post long term to develop it even further. We do have
an ongoing Collaboration Programme at Moviola
between festivals, but obviously not as extensively
developed as the scheme organised around the festival.
However, ihe work to generate the level of support
needed to enable this level of activity to exist could be a
full time post in itself Also, one aspect I'd like to be able
to encourage further, which has begun with my
programme, is the invitation to national, as well as
regional practitioners. For example, Adam Gill comes
down from Glasgow once a week, and Julie Myers up
from London. The invitation of Ihese highly skilled
practitioners to participate in the programme was not an
arbitrary decision but borne from the belief in joining
together the most appropriate practitioners for each
group.

Footnotes

1. Owen Kelly. Community. Art and the State. Comedia, London.
1985 p2.

VIDEO POSITIVE is hosting a seminar Whose Art. Whose Idea?'
to discuss some ot the above issues at 2pm on 4.5.93 at Unity
Theatre

The Passing by Bill Viola 1992

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Things

Tha t

They

Do

Better

Than

Us

by

John

Wyver

It is not only because of Miss Marple and Poirot that
British television is admired and envied abroad Among
those working with video in an independent or
experimental tradition, there is a recognition that, in
however marginal a way. broadcasting in this country
has over the past decade offered a significant number
of production possibilities

In Ghosts in the Machine, in the 19:4:90 Interventions, in
Ihe One Minute Pieces and Experimenta, in After Image
and The Dazzling Image, in ambitious and individual
works by David Larcher Malcolm Le Grice and indeed
Peter Greenaway and in productions by Anna Ridley
British television has funded (often in con|unction with
the Arts Council of Great Britain) and screened a
diverse range of exciting and challenging work. In the
past two years, these possibilities have diminished but
they have not (yet) disappeared

Much energy has gone into establishing these
opportunities and into arguing for their extension. The
achievements have been celebrated and critiqued, but
too often all of this activity has operated within a narrow
range of reference Television in Britain remains inward-
looking, hermetic, parochial Artists' video suffers from
similar deficiencies to a lesser, but still significant
degree. Despite VIDEO POSITIVE and screenings at the
LONDON FILM FESTIVAL, we remain remarkably
ignorant about artists' video and experimental television
from abroad, and certainly very little of such work is
seen on television itself.

It would of course be wrong to suggest that the
airwaves and the satellite links of Europe and the USA
hum with creative and challenging artists offerings. But
among the gameshows and soaps there Is a range of
interesting, distinctive, original, innovative, experimental
and often surprising work which indicates new
directions and possibilities for collaborations between
broadcasters and artists. It is work which engages with
the concerns of today and of tomorrow, and which
seeks new languages to explore and express ideas
which would be unlikely to emerge within the
conventions which dominate and constrain most of our
own creative television.

The theme of this piece might therefore be summarised
as Some Aspects of the Relationships between Artists
and Broadcasters Abroad from Which We Might do Well
to Learn'. Or if you prefer, 'Six Things That They Do
Better Than Us'.

1 New Collaborations with Artists

There is a short, simple video work by French directors
Virginie Roux and Anne Soulhat called Le Balcon. It
presents a strange performance piece, acted without
words by a number of characters in Nineteenth Century
costume. They take tea in an elegant interior, exchange
uneasy glances, and then assemble at a large window.
The piece lasts about 4 minutes, at the end of which a
tableau that they form reverses round and changes into
a well-known painting. They are revealed as the
characters in Manet's 1869 canvas Le Balcon.

Le Balcon is a mysterious and immensely imaginative
approach to a familiar artwork. It was produced as part
of a collaboration between the Musee d'Orsay in Paris,
where the painting hangs, and the French cultural
channel La Sept. The tape is one of a number which
have been screened on television but which also play in
the Musee as a way of getting people to engage with
and look at paintings in the collection.

variant page

The funding structures in France encourage such
relationships between museums and producers. The
Louvre has also recently been involved in the creation of
a number of works developed by artists and with the
German cultural channel Arte, and the Centre Georges
Pompidou has undertaken a series of 90-second videos
by artists, each of which is developed from a single
piece in the collection. But in Britain, while close
relationships do exist between broadcasters and
museums and galleries, there has to date been no
relationship which has sought to produce imaginative
and creative work like Le Balcon.

? Long-form Works by Artists

Despite my comment at the start about video works for
television by Larcher, Le Grice and Greenaway, there is
really no tradition in Britain of nurturing feature-length
works by artists, or of showing the best of those from
abroad. To take |ust one example. Bill Viola's most
recent tape The Passing is unquestionably a major work
It is a poetic, allusive meditation on, at its simplest, birth
and death. It's intimate, self-revelatory, compelling and
genuinely accessible. And it was co-funded by the
German broadcaster ZDF, by their series das Kleine
Fernsehspiel. Viola's work, which lasts some 55 minutes,
is likely to be screened by BBC2 in December, alongside
his show at the Whitechapel Gallery, but at present there
is nowhere in British television where such a piece might
find funding, support and a place in the schedule on any
kind of regular basis

3 Encourage Their Artists

European television, or parts of it at least, cherishes and
respects artists like Viola, Jean-Luc Godard and
Stefaan Decostere who are mentioned below. Perhaps
the clearest example is that of Alexander Kluge who
produces two, sometimes three arts programmes each
week for the new commercial services in Germany.
Kluge was one of the cornerstones of the New German
Cinema of the '70s, but in the past five years or so he
has devoted most of his time to television. His outpul is
eclectic and he embraces a range of in-depth interviews
with cultural and political figures, features which explore
aspects of the new Germany and also imaginative re-
workings of archive footage.

It is the range and extent of his activity, his centrality to
the schedule of the 3SAT service and his single-minded
devotion to a vision which makes him particularly
interesting He Is able to set the terms of his work with
television, whereas in Britain, the major artists who have
struggled with television - Greenaway and Jarman being
the obvious examples - and also those who might
develop given more opportunities, are always expected
to work within the constraints of particular forms and
particular strands Stranding and branding are obviously
fundamental to the survival of arts programming, but
there must also be places for the development of an
artist's vision outside the rigid genre forms with which we
are all too familiar.

4 Extending the Language of the Medium

Over the past fifteen years, Jean-Luc Godard has
engaged in a fundamental re-thinking of the possibilities
of the television language, pushing it into the future in a
way that is constantly challenging and refreshing. His
Hisloires du Cinema, only the first two episodes of which
have been completed, was co-produced with Canal Plus
in France and is - and is not - a personal and
idiosyncratic history of the cinema It is dense, multi-
layered, complex and rewarding in a way that almost

nothing else Is about the cinema, about images and
sounds, about film and video, about memory, about the
Twentieth Century. And nothing in the work developed
by artists lor British broadcasters comes close to
matching its concern to re-invent the language of the
medium Nor is it really possible to imagine where, en Ihe
current ecology, anyone with such ideas would look
within British television. Fortunately Channel 4 will screen
Hisloires du Cinema at some point during 1993.

5 Ideas, Philosophy, Theory

For much of the time, the closest we get to theory on
British television is talking heads on The Late Show
wrestling with post-modernism And there is little artists'
work which engages directly with, or which endeavours
to find an appropriate language for. expressing
contemporary ways in which we might think about,
understand and make sense of our chaotic, fragmented
world.

In his work for Flemish-language television service BRTS
over the past ten years, the Belgian director Stefaan
Decostere has taken on a diverse range of contemporary
concerns and debates, but he has always sought to
create an imaginative visual form within which to explore
them His recent tape Travelogue for example, is
addressed to the ways in which we display the world to
ourselves - television, museums, the city, exhibitions, the
novel - to the ways in which these systems organise
fragments to create a seemingly coherent whole, and to
the structures of power - particularly of colonialism which
underpin these forms of display. Decostere draws on a
remarkable range of sources, his own fragments, but he
manages to integrate them into a fast-paced, intense,
dazzling visual display which achieves a density and
richness which simply cannot be matched by anything
any programme-maker or artist in Britain, whether
working for television or not, has produced in recent
years

6 Expanded TV

The Ponton Media Art Group in Hamburg is concerned to
have us do more with television than simply watch it. Last
year, alongside the huge visual arts exhibition
DOCUMENTA IX in Kassel, they mounted the interactive
television project Piazza Virtuale This ran on the German
3SAT satellite service for 700 hours during the 100 days
of DOCUMENTA and viewers - or rather participants -
could call in by telephone and then draw on Ihe screen
with graphics software, play musical Instruments,
converse with other callers and become actively involved
in a number of other ways Communications were
established with 27 cities and with the space shuttle
Atlantis.

Piazza Virtuale was only the latest of a number of multi-
media, interaclive events which the Ponton Media Art
Lab has organised, drawing together the arts and the
media in a remarkable - and in this country -
unimaginable way But it seems essential to explore and
exploit new media technologies in bold and imaginative
experiments like this. Otherwise the options for these
technologies will be restricted and controlled in very
narrow ways.

All of these programmes and projects, and indeed many
others, have much to offer both artists and broadcasters
in Britain If we looked harder and with more interest at
these strands of work from abroad and if we opened
ourselves up to their influences, then our own already
rich collaborations between artists and broadcasters
would simply be richer.

THE BAIRD "TELEVISOR

Diagram of the first successful " Television '' transmitter now exhibited

at South Kensington Museum.

B

A. The object to be transmitted. (This is the original ventriloquist's head used by Mr.
Baird in his first experiments.)

B. Revolving Dial with lenses, causing a succession of images of the object A to pass over
the disc C.

C. A slotted disc revolving at high speed interrupts the light reflected from the image,
causing it to reach the light-sensitive cell in a series of flashes.

D. Before reaching the cell, the light passes through a rotating spiral slot, giving a further
subdivision of the image.

E. The aperture through which the light passes to the light-sensitive cell. The action of
the discs B, C and D is to cause the light image to fall on the cell in a series of flashes,
each flash corresponding to a small square of the image.

These flashes falling on the cell generate electrical impulses which are transmitted to
the receiving machine, where they control the light from a lamp placed behind an
optical device which is similar to, and revolves exactly in step with, the transmitting
machine.

By this means a spot of light of varying intensity is caused to traverse a ground-glass
screen. The light is bright at the high lights and dim at the shadows. This light
spot traverses the screen so rapidly that owing to the persistence of vision the whole
image appears instantaneously to the eye.

The receiving apparatus is not shown.

What ' s
Wrong With

Video
Criticism?

by

Sean

Cubi 1 1

Video criticism suffers from the same
complaints as art and media criticism, only
more so, since it borrows its faults from
both. Luckily there is no such thing as video
theory, though there are theoretical writings
about video (I have perpetrated some
myself). Video theory, were it to exist,
would be wholly destructive: as video is
diverse and protean, so should be the
writing on it. But this is no excuse for
ignorance or impressionism. Writing about
video is integral to the video culture, an
experimental zone in which to essay and
assay the electronic media. But just as the
electronic media arts have challenged what
we can think of as art or culture, so we
should look to the writing about them to
challenge the comfortable and comforting
platitudes of contemporary criticism. Yet it
does not. What's wrong with video
criticism? Lack of history, lack of
economics, lack of geography, lack of
technology: art history without the history
and media theory without the media, lack of
specificity towards the medium, pallid
postmodernisms. What follows is not so
much a criticism of critics, but a
programme for a new video criticism.

HISTORY

We insist on viewing each piece of work as if il sprang
from the ground fully formed. Or we might try to locate a
specific piece of work in relation lo other nearby works
And we can guess at the big historical references of a
work But there is little sign that critics have undertaken
to place video in the history - and it is only the history of
one hundred years - ol the moving image.

Historian of early cinema Noel Burch argues (hat
before the emergence of (he classical system of
cinema, with its continuily editing, its realist mise-en-
scene, its deep focus and staging in depth, In short the
techniques developed lo hide the fact that a story is
being told, there existed, albeit briefly, an alternative
mode of production in tilms. one which we have almost
lost. Characterised most of all by showing rather than
telling, the early films of Melies Porter and Griffith
constantly address Ihe audience, show off their magical
Iricks like a vaudeville sideshow One should be
constantly struck by the failure of contemporary works
lo pick up on the techniques developed back then, or
amazed when they are recycled. Zbigniew
Rybcynski's homage to Melies is an intriguing
exception, and the work of Jean-Paul Fargier in France
is a direct descendant of this showing-not-telling
aeslhetic of the early cinema But stranger variants
exist Rewatching the famous episode of Dallas in
which Bobby meets his death, I was constantly struck
by the use of primitive cinema techniques - shallow
staging, the use of the traverse of the screen from side
lo side, like actors crossing a stage between the wings,
and music styled to inform Ihe audience, as once
lecturers and barkers accompanying silent screenings
had done, of ihe import of each narrative development.

Though Eisenstein s theories and practice of montage
has conlinued to be a fertile source of innovation In the
avanl garde there is little sense lo be found of Ihe
potentiality of parallel and alternating editing developed
by Griffiths and Pathe in Ihe first decade of this century,
al least if we are to go by the critics. Yet in tapes like
George Young's Accidents in the Home series, the
mserl edit constanlly disrupts and expands the terms of
narration. All too often, critics applaud artists who throw
oul Ihe baby of narrative with the bathwater of classical
Hollywood narration, and this wilhout an understanding
of the historical reasons why American classicism arose
to institutional prominence. There are extraordinary
resources buried in the brief history of the moving
image media, from the magical jump-cuts of DG Phalke
to the quizzical framing ol Ozu, treasures that critics
lend loo much to ignore.

Al the same lime as we fail lo mark the uses of editing
to remake temporal relations, we are too unfamiliar with
the histories of both sculpture and still and moving
images to make sense of moves to build alternative
spatial relationships within and between screens. The
histories of both monumental and micro-sculpture
bound up. for example, in Stansfield and Hoykaas'
works, escape the ill-informed critic, myself included,
who has not devoted an adequate amount of time to an
understanding of the relationship between high-
technology hardware and the traditional media software
upon which, quite legitimately, we build. In that
software, we need especially lo single out the history of
work in space, since video is nol only a time-based
medium, and not a simple sculptural form, but is a
mode of transmission, of implicating different spaces
(of recording and post production, for example) in a

single place. An understanding of the history of
Twentieth Century sculpture and of contemporary
museology would open up a whole new vista for us
here. Most of all we fail, even deliberately, to
understand how the history of our art is history,
imbricated, despite and through its autonomy, in the
lives that surround it.

Ignorance of history condemns us to the endless
repetition of it. Oil painting began in the service of the
church, just as video begins in the service of the media
institutions. It glorified the feudal regime, as video
anoints the head of transnational capital. But slowly, and
not without difficulty, painting emerged free of its
religious and political shackles, though only at the price
of losing its centrality in daily life. Cinema, on the other
hand, sacrificed its autonomy for its public. What risks
and what liberations stand poised for us at the end of
this millennium?

ECONOMICS

It's not entirely our fault that economics has slipped out
of the art-critical agenda. The rise to centrality ol
finance capital (in place of production or even services)
accompanied the predominance of mathematical rather
than human economic science and the mystifications of
monetarist politics. So it's no surprise that, though many
of us pay lip-service to some kind of economic analysis
(capitalism still forms the conscious background to our
musings), most of us haven't opened a text on
economics since we left our Capital reading groups at
the end of the '70s. But the cash nexus doesn't go away
because we have stopped thinking about it. Even
though it is hard to argue now that the economic base
determines the artistic superstructure, every artist and
every critic must be aware that the cash nexus plays a
major role in shaping the kinds of work that are made,
the spaces available for their exhibition, and the sorts ol
audience that come to see them.

Art is, after all, as easily - indeed more easily - defined
by its economic form as by its intrinsic characteristics
Art is that form of commodity which is sold through
galleries. The conditions of its making are the last
remnants of an older tradition of artisan production - we
are still shocked to find artists like Anselm Kieffer
working in conditions more akin to small-batch factory
production. But your average critic sees this as just a
sidelight on the real aesthetic business of art The
public seems better informed, rocked with disbelief
every time another modern art piece changes hands for
always more astronomical sums. What does the critic
care for the stitch-up between finance capital, drugs
and arms money, the international gallery circuit,
features in the big art magazines and the things we like
to look at?

I don't wish to argue that cash and its meanderings are
the secret meaning of contemporary video art But it is
essential to understand that this art only exists - exists in
the forms and in the places in which it does - because
there is an underlying fiscal system that delimits and
constrains what can be made, what can be written, at a
given point in time. We need an economic analysis, not
to decipher tapes and reduce them to their economic
determinants, but in order to understand the grounds on
which they are made, circulated and received - far more
important than changing vocabularies: change the
world We have to understand why art is both so
marginal lo the everyday life of populations, and yet so
valuable to the ultra-rich, even while we try to intervene,

to get video and electronic media arts their place in the
fiscal sun. We need to see clearly which kinds of art live
where, and to develop and encourage work that joins in
the processes of the global economy on every
appropriate level, not least by taking account of the
ways in which public funding sets agendas for art-
making, and the implication of the art market in cycles
of capital that all too often veer away from the tenets of
ethical investment

What this means, in turn, is not that we should condemn
an art that is successful in traditional art-career terms. It
would be inappropriate to give up the struggle, and to
hand the high-art world back to the dull painterlmess of
the new art commodities. But likewise we should not
give up on the myriad other levels al which the media
arts operate, each as valid: the training, the community
work, (he education, the small galleries, the touring
packages, the little as well as the big magazines. But
what we should do, we critics at the very least, is try to
place all these activities in terms of the economic
relationships within which they are both enabled and
constrained, and in understanding, join the struggle to
ameliorate and ultimately to change them.

GEOGRAPHY

There's a cliche in circulation that we live in a shrinking
world, that the global village is a reality, that
instantaneous communication puts us in touch with
everyone, that everyone is now subject to and of the
global media culture. At the same time, we give no
specific attention to either the products ol the vast
majority of the world's population, nor lo the conditions
under which they (and by inference we) live and make
their work. We ignore the very populations who build the
machines on which we work. We are delighted to find
third world work, not disgusted by the conditions that
make it so rare. If anything, the last thirty or forty years
have seen a widening set of physical, economic, social
and cultural differences across the world.

Cultural differences manifest themselves not in the
increased similarity between cultures prophesied by
MacLuhan, but in their increasing dissimilarity. The
small number of artworks from Latin America. Africa and
Asia that make it to the UK, indeed to the West in
general, indicate diversity, not homogeneity. Far from
Baudrillard's imploding silent majorities, which, if they
exist, are characteristic only of the media-saturated
West, the global scene is one of enormous difference
and challenge to the Eurocentric vision of
postmodernism. Cultural difference enables
explorations of areas of practice that we cannot begin to
work in, since we are too tightly bound by our own
identities, our own sense of what makes a difference
Yet we are reluctant to step outside the realm of what
we know: the familiar boundaries of familiar names,
familiar CVs and ultimately familiar forms of work that,
innovative though they may be within a narrow domain,
can only challenge within that restricted space.

If the result is bad in the art-world generally, it is doubly
so in the ill-funded video low-life zone. Curiously
enough, video practice seems strangely bound to
national cultures, especially in Europe. British, Dutch,
Canadian, French, German, American, Spanish video
art is often recognisable, and curatorial choices as well
as artists' interests seem inordinately bound by national
frontiers. This leads me to suspect thai Ihe critic's role
has been undervalued: that the art discourses of a
specific nation have become part of the bedrock upon

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which artworks are made. This isn't intended as a bid
for more glory for critics (though a travel allowance
would be nice). It is meant as a statement of the
responsibilities of the critic in the age of the global
system. The discourses within which we write are
parochial, and perpetuate the parochialism of curation
and art-making. We subordinate video from abroad to
the status of exotica in the local culture we reproduce,
even - perhaps especially - in our most desperate
attempts to break free of Eurocentrism.

Despite the claims of the ecology movement to have
opened our eyes to the global nature of our position in
the world, too many of us are blinkered. Our world is not
the hyperreal envisaged by the postmodernising
intelligentsia, who have in any case turned their backs
on the struggle for a better world, delighted by the
discovery lhat you can have glamourous French theory
without the onus of political commitment. The threat of a
global mediasphere is only rhetorical: Ihe world is not
going to standardise, because capital can only survive
on the basis of contradiction, and global capital only by
exporting contradiction. That is why the class struggle
seems to be over in the West, while the gap- between
global rich and poor is vaster than ever Cultural life
doesn't float free of all this shit: art too is crisis-ridden,
has its own disaster areas, and not only in the poorest
countries. This too must become part of the video
culture.

TECHNOLOGY

We don't really seem to know what we are looking at.
Years ago, in an essay on singing, Roland Barthes
inveighed against the fatal ease with which music
criticism slips towards adjectives. 'This miich'. he
argues, 'can be said: it is not by struggling against the
adjective. . that one stands a chance of exorcising
music commentary and liberating it... rather than try to
change directly the language on music, it would be
belter to change the musical object itself, as it presents
itself to discourse, better to alter its level of perception
or intellection, to displace the fringe of contact between
music and language ,'' Very much the same, I think,
needs saying of the relation between video criticism and
video itself. Looking at much of my own writing, I find a
dependence on adjectives to convey something of the
tone or import lhat a piece of work has had for me. A
great deal is missing from this kind of writing, some of
which I'm trying to address in Ihis article.

Immediately, what is missing is a sound formal grasp of
the precise means which are deployed in a given piece
of work With rare exceptions like Terry Flaxton's
writing, I have yet to see a review or an article that takes
to its heart the processes of making and showing that
go into a work Who talks of lighting, who investigates
the differences between aperture settings? Where is the
analysis of the different qualities of different tape stocks,
cameras, lenses? What can be understood '. about the
difference between monitors on playback? How
profoundly new are the shifting technologies of video
projection? How common are staging in depth, long
takes, mobile cameras...? What are the precise values
of CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras, and how
different are the various techniques for delaying the
passage from recording to playback? How accurately
are tapes edited, and how can you tell?

The discourses around computer arts err. if anything, to
the opposite extreme: the arts and science magazine
Leonardo is packed with number-crunchers in pursuit of
the ultimate soft object. While respecting the need for

technical journals. I am making a claim here for a more
general critical discourse - where criticism is to be held
as a public argumentation over the merits of work, a
process of disputation between artwork, critic and
audiences, In which the critic is, indeed, only a member
of the public with a word processor. Such a discourse
needs to be able to address the aesthetics and even
the ethics of editing and framing, cropping and
digitisation, chromakey and frame-grabbing, and
expound the significant aspects of treated as opposed
to algorythmically-generated images, of various modes
of recording and generating sound, of the sculptural
and spatial - ultimately geographical - qualities of
installation

The 'two cultures', art and science, come together in
media arts: there can be no criticism that is not as
aware of Boolean algebra and signal-to-noise ratios as it
is of Jeff Koons and Hollywood Ignorance is no longer
amusing or defensible: a criticism adequate to the art,
adequate to the audience, demands that we be
adequate to Ihe technology - we take it seriously, on its
own terms and on ours. We need to build a
technological critique of art, just as we need aesthetic
critiques of technology: much of the best work of the
last decade, indeed right back to Paik and Vostell s
first works, is undertaken in a spirit of engineering the
imagination. If, in this instance, we do not return to the
metaphor of the engineer, we will be condemned to live
by the metaphor of the manager, governing trope of the
New Right and its postmodernist acolytes

ENVOI

Video criticism needs to go back to school, to take its
lessons in history, geography, economics and
technology What we've had so far is enthusiasm and
adjectives, some polemics, and some theories. What we
don't need is a body of knowledge for new generations
to learn - no Grand Unified Theory of Everything Digital
What we do need is to start the ball rolling - again This
means more than just listening to ourselves talk, more
than opening the doors to strangers. We have to go out
into the highways and byways, drag in the publicans
and sinners of social and physical sciences. The life of
our culture is made up of its interactions, an ecology like
any other ecology Video, the electronic image and the
moving image more generally are the constantly-
renewed products of a global social, cultural, economic
and political formation upon which they in turn have
their oblique but potent impacts To understand this
complex web of mutually Informing processes, we must
open the world of interpretation to a far wider set of
discourses, in the awareness that we have much to
learn, but also much to teach A democratic criticism
must involve dispute between interpretations, but it can
only exist as the process of learning from the insights
and errors of others. More even than the mass audience
art lost in its journey into freedom, we need to find out.
from whatever sources can help, what we are doing,
and what risks and possibilities lie ahead Otherwise,
we will be managed into oblivion, and the democratic
ecology of video culture that some of us have been
rooting for will be submerged under the dead weight of
the nothing-new

Footnotes

1 First published in 1972 translated by Stephen Heath as The
Grain of the Voice' in image-Music-Text. Fontana, 1977

Sean Cubitt is the author of Timeshilt: on Video Culture
(Routledge, 1991) and Videography Video. Media as Art and
Culture (MacMillan) forthcoming

Reflections

on Echo— Sound

by Women Artists

in Britain

by

Jean Fisher

Discussions of media-based art rarely include a
substantial review of sound, whether it is used as a
component or as the sole medium of a work. Al its most
effective sound is not simply laid on to provide a
background unifying elemenl to the flow of images or
actions, but both collaborates in the produclion of
meaning and extends the spatial dimension of the work
Sound evokes images; but it also positions the listener
in a physical relation to the source of transmission, or in
an illusory relation to distance (drawing nearer/fading
away) There is an extensive practice by women artists
that uses sound to explore the sociosexual implications
of speech and audition It is what this work has to say
about the construction of female subjectivities that
these notes attempt lo address.

The inattention to aural experience In the construction of
human subjectivity is undoubtedly coincidental with a
general emphasis in critical debates on visual
representation, an emphasis which is attributed to the
priority given to vision in a Western culture dominated
by patriarchal principles Jacques Lacan equates this
priority with the visibility of the phallus, rendering it the
privileged signifier of potency under which all those
constituencies deemed lacking - in terms of race,
gender, class etc - are subordinated Certainly, vision
has a significant place In the classical founding myths
of patriarchy. Oedipus' self-blinding is interpreted by
Freud as castration' (the self's submission to the
authority of the Father - Symbolic language); but it is
worth noting that this shift towards a feminine' position
of 'lack' simultaneously enables the hero lo gain insight
- access to an other' knowledge beyond perceptual
vision. This visionary role is not, however, given equal

value in terms of gender We might contrast the status
held by Ihe blind seer Tiresias, or ihe blind philosopher
Sophocles, with that of Cassandra. Like Tiresias she is
also a visionary and yet she is deprived ol a legitimate
speech: her utterances are dismissed as incon-
sequential mad ravings.

A similar depreciation of the female voice and a
usurpation of Its creative potential is to be found in
contemporary media representations. I should like to
draw attention to Kaja Silverman s analysis concerning
the use of the woman's voice In mainstream cinema
since, like the use of her image as visual spectacle, it
aims lo disavow and project the male subject's
impotence, or symbolic castration', onto the body and
voice of the feminine ' This female voice is denied its
own utterances to become the site of a discursive
impotence- his acoustic mirror' As Silverman points
out, 2 one rarely encounters a genuine female voice-
over in classic film since this position assumes an
omniscienl or transcendental (traditionally male) author
of ihe narrative. By contrast, the thrust of a good
percentage of conventional psychosexual dramas Is to
make the woman confess, to reveal her true nature', as
it were; (and is this not also the demand that Freud as
father confessor' makes of his hysterical' female
patients?). 3 The extreme expression of this 'confession'
is the extraction of an involuntary cry, confirming for the
male subject his equation of the feminine with the body
and nature (as distinct from the mind and intellect), and
with the infantile (immature or meaningless speech).
The female voice is conventionally synchronised with
the Image track precisely because it is as 'body as lack'
that she is constructed in mainslream cinema, a

function that Brian de Palma's Blow-Out, 1981,
knowingly exploits. Blow-Out is a postmodern reworking
of the Orpheus and Narcissus myths of male creativity.
Where, however, does this place women's creative
practice? If Eurydice is rendered mute and Echo
deprived of the right to be the subject of enunciation
within the discourses of patriarchy, in what way can
women be the producers of meaning and not simply its
passive sign? Can 'lack' be turned to positive effect?

What can be said about Echo's prescribed position?
According to one version, Echo's story begins with a
maternal sentence. Hera is vexed by the nymph Echo's
incessant chatter which distracts her from keeping an
eye on Zeus' adulterous affairs. As a punishment, Hera
prohibits Echo from uttering all but the last phrase of
another's speech. Echo subsequently falls hopelessly in
love with the beautiful but self-absorbed Narcissus.
Some say he drowned in his own reflection; others say
he metamorphosed into a lovely flower. In any case, like
Orpheus, Narcissus presents a redemptive phantasy of
male loss and regeneration: the artist/poet whose
creative act springs from a denial and a usurpation of
the generative role of the feminine (the 'maternal') in
order to secure his own immortality. As for her. she may.
through her expiratory breath, be the inspiration but not
the producer of meaning. Thus, as Eurydice's body is
relegated to the place of a liminal shade, so Echo's
body fades away leaving a voice without originary
speech that is, according to this patriarchal myth,
nowhere in particular. Clearly her utterance is quite
other than the authorial voice of being, since there is no
being to speak of But Echo's disembodied voice that
speaks in others' tongues presupposes an additional
function: it is also an ear. Echo becomes both audio
receiver and transmitter.

I want to pursue the significance of this function by way
of what might, at first, appear to be an unlikely literary
elaboration of the story of Echo (if only unconsciously on
the part of the author) in Bram Stoker's late Gothic
novel Dracula. 4 It is the character of Mina who absorbs
our attention, for she is the matrix of the plot to which all
things collect and from which they are reproduced.
Mina, described by the patriarch Van Helsing as having
'the mind of a man' (but nevertheless possessing those
feminine weaknesses against which she must be
protected), collects and disseminates information: she
writes in hieroglyphic shorthand; she reads and
transcribes the written and phonographic diaries; she
listens to the men's talk and lends an ear to their
emotional troubles; and she collates and reproduces
everything on her typewriter. Later, in telepathic
communication with Dracula, she becomes his ear and
recorder as he flees his future assassins. Her role is
thus centred on an economy of the ear, not of
perceptual vision: she 'sees' and 'hears' what the men
do not. In short, she encompasses those roles assigned
to women in the capitalist economy or its fringes: typist,
stenographer, nurse, psychic medium, psychoanalyst,
etc - all ears, and typically connected to the
technologies of communication.

from the single-screen use of film and video, slide and
sound projection, to multi-media performance and
installation. Women's strategic use of a heterogeneity of
media practices is not simply the result of their being
less circumscribed by male-dominated aesthetic codes
Theories of female subjectivity were instrumental in
challenging the modernist notion of stable and fixed
human identities defined in relation to a privileged
sovereign subject (white, middle-class and male). If an
effective female practice was excluded from the history
of modernism's static and autonomous object, it is in
part because this ideal object, also circumscribed by a
privileging of vision, served as a mirror for a
transcendental ego. Narcissus is transfixed in a deathly
relation with his phantasised image through which,
nevertheless, he misrecognises himself and others. If
women's art practices turned away from this narcissistic
investment in the ideal object, it was in part because
they recognised its inadequacy as a model of
subjectivity in a world of ever-shifting identities.

By contrast, time-based medium and installation
strategies that insist on the mobility and accumulative
experience of the viewer, introduce a temporal
component to art production and reception. (Indeed,
one of the legacies of '70s aesthetic debates, not
however exclusive to feminism, was a Brechtian
insistence of the active and critical participation of the
viewer in the production of meaning in the work). This, in
turn, opens the work to models of transformability: a
potential to interrogate idealist illusions of coherent
subjectivity, and to explore the mutability and
heterogeneity of human identities. Hence, for those
groups previously denied the right to represent their
own experience, time-based functions provide the
means for re-narrating subjectivity and transforming a
sense of selfhood from the fixed categories of race,
gender and class imposed by dominant culture. It Is,
therefore, a kind of narrativity that interests us here:
Echo's oral-aural circuit. However, a cautionary note: I
am not imputing an essential feminine to sound or
narrativity, for this would distract us from the profound
heterogeneity of women's experiences and their
expression in culture. While we may all, broadly
speaking, share the same language, our experience,
and hence use of it, as gendered, class or ethnically
defined subjects is by no means identical. The question
is, rather, of the way the reproductive value of the
female voice has been not simply suppressed but
colonised by a language dominated by the privileged
subject and positioned in its social discourses. While
women have been essential to economic productivity
('labour' in both senses of the word), this role is
rendered marginal in society's master narratives of
productivity and creativity. It is also, therefore, a
question of working through the stereotype of a feminine
passivity to which, at first glance, Echo's repetition
appears to conform Given this non-place assigned to
Echo, does her repetition always return language to a
put (male) place of origin and its pretensions to
transcendental meaning, or can it shift the ground of the
sociosexual text?

In retrospect, we should not be surprised to find that,
since the late '60s and the development of non-
traditional forms of art, women artists have found a
creative space through technological media, ranging

It is precisely because we are dealing here not with
nature but with language and its fundamental
'indifference' that subtle interventions seem possible.
From this reflection on women's sound-work and female

authorship two interdependent concerns are of note: an
interrogation of the discursive spaces occupied by the
voice leading to a displacement of given terms of
linguistic utterance, and the return of a repressed
(maternal) economy. We might say that the 'other'
written out of a dominant culture has an uncanny way of
rising up in the very place from which it was evacuated -
which is. of course, the demon that Dracula's narralive
ol patriarchal power seeks to pacify.

I should like now to shift the location of this narrative to
Greenham Common outside London where in 1981.
thousands of women, from different social classes
gathered to form a peace camp in protest against the
installation of the 501 si USAF nuclear missile base. The
base was perceived as symbolic of a malignant military
policy endangering the future of life itself. I should like to
discuss two pieces of work that refers to this scenario:
Tina Keane's single-screen video version of In Our
Hands, Greenham. 1984, and Alanna O'Kelly's sound
work Chant Down Greenham. 1988 s

In the visual component of her piece, Tina Keane takes
up a primary metaphor in the peace camp: women's
industry (productivity) as it works to form the matrix of
community, yet its exclusion from the site of power
Images of a spider spinning her web are juxtaposed
with footage of the women's activities - joining hands
around and outside the perimeter fence of the base,
weaving webs of wool to symbolise strength in unity:
decorating the fence with family photographs and
personal memorabilia. The soundtrack counterpoints
the sounds of the peace camp with a woman's voice-
over testimony of how she decided, independently of
her husband's opinion, to march for peace, and her
witness to the ensuing confrontation with the police
What emerges is the sense of euphoria and
comradeship experienced by the women. Throughout
the body of Keane's earlier work, her own childhood
memories are woven with the encounters in language of
her growing daughter, but continuity here entails not a
repetition of the same but a constant attempt to
reinscribe and remake female subjectivity across
diverse social narratives

Alanna O'Kelly's Chant Down Greenham is less an overt
narrative than a tone poem, composed of
uncompromising silences alternating, like Keane's
piece, with the sounds of the camp - the women's
wordless echolalia. their derisive whistling, their
chanting and drumming, their laughter, and the noise of
circling helicopters which, since the Vietnam War (or, at
least, since Apocalypse Now!) has come to represent
the chilling sound of military aggression These sounds
are orchestrated with a powerful keening (from the Irish
caoine, or Caoineadh na Marbh - keen for the dead,
which is traditionally part of women's duties at funeral
rites). O'Kelly's menacing sustained expulsion of breath
is less a cry of loss, however, than a rallying cry of
defiance, to which the women's chanting and laughter
becomes a chorus or echo of solidarity. This cry is
therefore a reminder of the materiality of sound as it
resonates through and connects bodies, revealing the
socially unifying function of communal chanting. And it
is through physicahty that the work exerts its most
powerful effect, for it not only hits us in the ear but also
in the solar plexus. Hence, sound here is not simply the

carrier of a message: it figures the power of the voice
and body to act beyond its subjugation to articulated
speech and its reduction to physiology. O'Kelly's
keening liberates the voice from the specularised body
and reinvents it as political agency, alluding, among
other fhings. to a refusal of the pacification of Irish
identities effected through English colonialism.

In neither of the Greenham' works is the notion of the
community of women, or communication among
women, intended to homogenise differences under
some universalising principle; in both cases singularity
or personal witness is juxtaposed with communal
experience, and one that is attached to a particular
social and historical moment. A collective articulation of
women's experiences reminds us that femaleness and
female sexuality are historically and politically
constituted

Interference in articulated speech, with its insistence on
the inscription of the speaker in linear historical time, is
what Echo calls into play Echo's repetition interrupts
and fragments logical syntax, reducing a given
utterance to an oscillation of phonetic signifiers
disengaged from a determinable 'originary' meaning. Is
this fracturing of symbolic language simply the sign of
an incoherent madness'? Or is 'madness' what is
produced in women whose own desires remain
unnarratable? This is what seems to be suggested by
Sharon Morris's soundwork Everyday. 1988. a litany of
the mundane repetitive routine of the house-bound wife
which periodically falls into delirious speech. However,
that this fracturing of articulated speech may also
provide a ground upon which to construct other'
meanings is suggested by Morris's The Moon is Shining
on My Mother. 1988. The piece begins with a woman's
voice singing a Welsh language lullaby Soon the voice
doubles, then multiplies, slipping Into a harmonic
humming From the repetition of the sound 'hum',
formed by a simple resonance, two voices echo the
childlike syllabic fragment 'ma-ma'. Then through a
dialogical syncopation, vowels and consonants
combine and recombine into a progression of syllables
that form themselves into English and French words:
a-ma. . mum-ma. . mur-mur. ..mur-der. ..mer-de. ..a-
mour...ai-mee...me-me...'. From this Babelian play of
phonetic differences a web of meaning-effects is spun
out that speaks of the interruption of the mother tongue
by the language of patriarchy, and hence the child's
accession to subjectivity through separation, loss or
desire for a maternal imaginative space. But in 'me'
there forever lingers the faint murmur of 'ma-ma': The
Moon is Shining on My Mother' is the song that fades to
a memory.

The cryptolinguistic sign is central to the work of Susan
Hiller Her use of projected automatic scripts and
wordless vocalisations alludes to what has been
absented from the sociopolitical domain yet remains as
a persistent trace or 'hallucination' at the borders of
social consciousness. Hiller makes visible these
seemingly marginal utterances as the very terms upon
which dominant narratives are predicated

Belshazzar's Feast/The Writing on Your Wall. 1983/84,
specifically refers to storytelling; one version presents a
cluster of video monitors arranged on the floor to

suggest a camp-fire 6 As we watch images of sparking
lights develop into flickering tongues of flame, a
woman's voice announces the commencement of an
artifice 'What the tire says. Take 1 ' Thereafter we
become engulfed in a mesmerising daemonic and
indecipherable vocalisation whose exotic overtones
suggest some other space or time. At intervals, a
secretive whispering recounts newspaper reports of
images of aliens transmitted on TV after station close-
down, and the artist's young son Gabriel hesitantly
attempts to describe the story of the cryptic and
apocalyptic inscription that the prophet Daniel is invited
to interpret' Betshazzar's Feast is a reverie on Ihe
images of reverie as figurations of repressed
unconscious desires What we perceive as transmitted
messages - in the fire, on TV, in the patterns of
wallpaper, etc - are projections of our own imaginings
What appears as the 'inexplicable' or 'illogical' on the
border of consciousness also marks the limit of the
subject in socialised language - or the limitations of the
latter to restrain desire In Betshazzar's Feast
vocalisation releases the vibrations of the libidinal body,
and different stones of 'other' selves become audible

Narratives proliferate, voices multiply, merge and echo
one with another No longer the stutters and paralyses
of an unspeakable 'reminiscence': no longer, also, the
confessions extricated from Freud and Breuer's
hysterical patients. Women's claim to an authorial voice,
resonant with their own experiences, is a move to re-
articulate an imaginary space with symbolic language, a
move that transgresses the Oedipal demand that they
accept their 'lack' with good grace. For Helen Cixous
this body called female is not to be censored, for to do
so is also to censor its breath and speech 'Write
yourself, she exhorts. 'Your body must make itself
heard'. 7 For Cixous also the female voice is an
embodiment, not of Oedipal lack but of a reactivation of
a pre-Oedipal desire for the Mother

'In feminine speech, as in writing, there never stops
reverberating something that, having once passed
through us. having imperceptibly and deeply touched
us. stilt has the power to affect us - song, the first music
of the voice of love, which every women keeps
alive. . The Voice sings from a time before taw. before
the Symbolic took one's breath away and
reappropriated it into language under its authority of
separation . . ' 8

If Cixous's Voice of the Mother seems like a phantasy of
a pre-Oedipal Utopia, it Is nevertheless articulated
through a post-Oedipal experience. As political agency,
perhaps we have to think it as a metaphor, like Hiller's
'automatic writing' something that insists in the
interstices of symbolic language, that rises like the
vampinc mist to contaminate it with its repressed
desires It is perhaps in this way that women's
storytelling reclaims the oral traditions of personal and
collective memory as counter-narratives to the
homogenising and depoliticising histories of dominant
discourses.

This is an adaptation of an article originally
commissioned as part of Signs of the Times' Catalogue
published by The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.

Chant Down Greenbam soundwork by Alanna O'Kelly. 1988

Footnotes

1. Kaja Silverman. The Acoustic Mirror The Female Voice in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Indiana University Press.
Bloomcngton and Indianapolis. 1988

2. Ibid p 165.

3. S. Freud and J. Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, The Pelican Freud
Library, 1974, p 368

4. Bram Stoker, Dracula. Bantam Books, New York (1897) 1981

5. O'Kelly's piece is part of an anthology of sound works by
women artists. Sound Moves. 1988, compiled by Sharon
Morris and Michelle Baharier, and co-ordinated by Projects
UK The work could be heard on British Telecom from 4 May
to 6 September 1988.

6. Betshazzar's Feast/The Writing on Your Wait, version installed
at the ICA. London. 1987.

7. Helene Cixous, 'Sorties', in Cixous and Catherine Clement, The

Newly Born Woman, translator Betsy Wing, University ol
Minnesota Press. Minneapolis, 1986, p 97

8. ibid p 93.

w

*»

From the Archive o! a Body photo performance by John Conomos and Sieve Lojewski. 1982 Photo: Sieve Lojewski

ft/-

ISr

John Conomos :

His Work and

Thoughts on

Australian

Video Practice

m

interviewed

by

Br i an

Langer

John Conomos is a video artist, critic

and writer who lectures in video, art and

film theory at the University of New South

Wales. He is editor of Scan+ ai

independent new media journal

published by Electronic Media Arts

(Australia) Ltd and is currently writing a

history of Australian video. He began

working with video in the late '70s. John

Conomos and collaborator David Haines

are presenting a new installation work at

Video Positive '93 funded with the

assistance of the Australia Council. Brian

Langer is a video and new media curator

and has been Director of the annual

AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL VIDEO

FESTIVAL since 1988.

John Conomos I was primarily a cinephile in the '60s
and '70s and I am still very interested in questions of
film form, mise-en-scene, performance, style etc. By the
1970s I was a closet writer of sorts, experimenting with
the possibilities of emerging as a literary writer In the
late '70s and early - 80s I was actually writing criticism
and verse, though none of my poetry has been
published because I didn't have the courage to go
public I was pushed into critical writing by the
Australian film-maker and academic Laleen
Jayamanne. who in the early 80s suggested I should
talk to Tina Kaufman, editor of 'Film News'.

In the late '70s I did a video production course at the
Australian Film, Television and Radio School. I became
interested in video because at that time I was writing
film scripts and I was looking at video as a possible
cheaper technology to make projects because as we all
know, film-making is such a long haul. Following this I
began exploring video and the time-based arts in the
mid '80s because I became much more interested in
questions ol avant-garde histories and textual practices
and the 'adventure of form' in electronic image-making.
Primarily my Interest in video is an extension of the
passion I have for the cinema and my interests in
cinema - to me (to echo Godard) it's all cinema whether
it be electronic or photo-chemical - it's all image-
making and it's all an extension of writing. I am more
interested in video and cinema as a form of
choreographic writing - a choreography of expression
with images and sounds. This explains my interest in
time-based arts, especially video, because it is an
incredibly elastic inter-textual medium to work with and
it allows one to explore aesthetic, cultural and formal
questions and pre-occupations much more readily than
say! working within the social context of cinema in
Australia as it was practiced in the '70s and now. It is a
question of textual preferences, convenience, historical
and cultural circumstances.

One of the more significant developments for me as an
artist, critic and writer in the areas of culture, electronic
arts and screen studies, is that I've opened up more to
the Imaginative possibilities of questions of inter-
textuality, 'borderline' cultural production that deals with
multiple spaces like, for instance, the post-humanist
self-reflexive cinematic practices of Raul Ruiz, Jean-
Luc Godard or Chris Marker I'm much more interested
in questions of poly-culturality, heterogeneity,
displacement and cultural otherness.

Brian Langer: Are you interested in the areas of
television and global media?

I'm very interested in the complex dialectic existing
between local audio-visual production in the Antipodes
and the cultural and technological ramifications of
global media in international communication flows.
There are very complex and multi-layered areas of
intersections between culture, sociology, philosophy,
institutions, gender and so forth, I'm always mindful of
this situation when I make my artworks, but these
concerns play a secondary role in the actual making of
my video pieces. I'm much more interested in the
aesthetic adventures of post - Godardian
experimentation and subjectivity.

variant page

Have recent feminist interventions into film and video
theory influenced your viewpoint on the development
of new technologies?

Anyone who comes from a cinema background and is
presently engaged in film-making as much as video-
making and film and technological arts criticism, is
indebted to the feminist screen theory produced during
the '70s and 80s. Feminist film theory has been crucial in
opening up the critical questions concerning
spectatorship. representation, gender, class, sexuality,
race and so forth. If you look at the emerging debates
around virtual reality and cyberspace technology, a lot of
the more engaging and probing critiques about these
more recent manifestations of our techno-culture
emanate from feminist circles Arguably, this is because
feminist debates are much more attuned to the
phallocentric and logocentric limitations of the Utopian
discourses surrounding virtual reality

Could you outline what you have discovered from the
artists, curators and educators you've interviewed for
your forthcoming monograph of video in Australia?

Well, in my research with past and present practising
video artists, media artists, curators and educators that
are interested in the new media arts, I must stress that
the research foregrounds the hermeneutic significance
of the theoretical debates central to the whole notion of
historiography Clearly, when one constructs a history it
is important to be aware of the many theoretical and
philosophical debates concerning illusionism,
subjectivity, cultural imperialism and so forth. In my
discussions with video artists from Ihe '70s and '80s and
more recently the early '90s, this has emphasised the
importance, to me, of having a sustained continuity of
cultural, institutional and pedagogic support for the
electronic arts in Australia.

When you speak to artists who began in the '70s such as
Jill Scott Randelli Leigh llobba Steven Jones David
Perry and more recently (since the early '80s) people
like Peter Callas Joan Brassil John Gillies and David
Chesworth, Ihey all testify to the problem of negotiating
with a cultural amnesia in their practice and
surroundings. In our media landscape video is still
waiting to be recognised whether it be in the fine arts
world, the cinema or in the world of community and
alternative/TV media. Video art has always been
relegated to the back seat

This problem of cultural amnesia for Australian video
artists, is the frustration that they have encountered in the
past and the present, in the sense that they are always
constantly re-inventing the wheel with video. It's been a
fitful ruptured history of stops and starts, booms and
bursts. Historically speaking, there has been a refusal, a
denial of the continued presence of the media arts in the
cultural landscape of this country

You have interviewed many artists who have received
Government funding towards the development of
their work. In cultural policy areas of the funding of
artists and the time based arts in Australia where do
you think the pressure is coming from?

There are a few people, on a nalional and interstate
level, who are Interested in questions of cultural policy
formulation and the articulation of policy pertaining to the
technological arts Unfortunately, historically speaking,
most lunders have been more attuned to the immediate,

direct needs of artists engaged with traditional two
dimensional media art forms. So, in spite of the important
interventionist role performed by Ihe electronic media
arts, such as the AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL VIDEO
FESTIVAL (since 1986) and organisations like Electronic
Media Arts (EMA) and Sydney Intermedia Network (SIN)
in Sydney. Modern Image Makers Association (MIMA) in
Melbourne and the Australian Network for Art and
Technology (ANAT) in Adelaide (and others), all these
organisational and cultural spaces are effectively
performing what I call salvation army' work. They are
endeavouring to open up more and more new vistas of
possibilities in the sustained and continued promotion of
electronic arts - and that's the operative word continued;
because we have very short memories in terms of what
has happened in the past and what is possible in the
luture and in the present.

So, yes, institutional cultural funding spaces are slowly
becoming sensitised to the funding, exhibition and
critical reception of electronic arts in this country. It's a
question of becoming more open to the possibilities of
electronic arts as expressed on a grass roots level with
the younger generation of eleclronic image-makers In
this country, to what is happening in terms of the festival
world and the pedagogic cultural sites in the northern
hemisphere.

I think it's very important to be mindful of this dialectical
relationship between the northern and southern
hemisphere in terms of local audio-visual production.
And I think this is one important objective the
AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL VIDEO FESTIVAL has
fulfilled and is fulfilling in introducing local electronic arts
to the works of American. European, English and
Japanese electronic image-makers since the '70s There
is much more of an effort there in building bridges

As the editor, what have been the main concerns of
SCAN+ ?

Since its inception in 1988, SCAN+ has been primarily
interested in sites and debates around time-based arts in
Australia because prior to that, the critical/cultural
landscape in the promotion of electronic arts has been
virtually negligible, particularly in terms of fostering video
criticism in this country. Also, it has a polemical objective
in a sense that it's trying to spearhead a cultural
interventionist mode of thinking; of negotiating the
dynamic presence of the electronic arts in Australia, so it
has been a very important editorial platform to articulate
the continued necessity for institutional funding support
for the electronic arts. Also, and most significantly, it
performs the role of an electronic switchboard, if you will,
between local artists on an interstate basis across the
breadth of this large country So the journal itself is very
interested in promoting 'rhizomatic textual practices, in
the context of critics, theorists, educators and artists - it
has adopted an anti-binary, anti-homogeneous stance
towards the electronic arts And I think that's important to
bear in mind - cullurally and polemically - what SCAN+ is
endeavouring to do.

In relation to your own video work, what are the
critical, conceptual, cultural and stylistic concerns
which you are interested in?

There are a number of fronts that I work on as a video
artist. First of all, because of my life-long interest in
surrealism and absurd theatre and absurd literature. I
see video as a very ideal medium to explore my

aspirations and inclinations to surreal image-making
Specifically. I'm very interested in the whole notion of the
surrealist critique of everyday life in terms of the poetry
of the marvellous, the irrational, reverie etc because of
my concerns since the '60s in European philosophy,
particularly in thinkers like Neitzsche. Bataille, writer-
auto-biographers like Michele Leris, philosophers like
Foucault and Deleuze I'm very interested In any kind of
imaginative adventure or theoretical critique which talks
about the laughter of the night and the notion of life as a
surrealist cabinet of chance, randomness and inter-
textual happening. So video, because it is a very elaslic
collage art form, gives me the opportunity to create an
art that highlights collage stylistics, radical
juxtapositioning and heterogeneity By colliding cinema
with literature, literature with philosophy, cultural theory
with fine arts theory, poetry with architecture and so
forth, video allows you to create these inter-textual
spaces, themes and stylistics which enables you to
articulate multiple vistas of imaginative possibilities I
have always been interested in visionaries like Antonin
Artaud and Andre Breton, or poets like Paul Eluard, or
Pablo Neurada or painters like Max Ernst and Henri
Magritte whoever theorised, wrote or painted under the
sign of absurdism, surrealism and so forth. Since my
teenage years I've been fascinated by these thinkers,
visionaries, poets for a number of many complex
autobiographic, cultural and philosophical reasons.
Because of my bi-cultural sub|ectivity and my own
personal circumstances. I've become attuned to the
theoretical, lyrical, poetic structures and concerns of
their works And video, for me, as much as cinema, I
must stress Ihis, has given me the opportunity to
articulate my interests in these realms of imaginative
thought, intuition and poetic insights.

I've been very influenced by cinematic and literary
influences In terms of my video work I've been very
keen to explore the possibilities of creating a 'surreal'
iconography of my own mterionty as a 'post-colonial'
subject living here in Australia in the '90s. I think that's
an important aspect of my work to stress For example,
from the '60s, I have been very interested in French
avant-garde cinema practices. Ihe historical avant-
garde film-makers like L'Herbier Cocteau Richter and
Fischinger etc and the more recent emergence of
European auteur cinema of the '50s and '60s I've
always been interested in the works of Chris Marker,
Jean Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette and many other
film-makers, in one way or another including dialectic'
film-makers too, like Alexander Kluge Jean-Marie
Straub Daniele Huillet and post-Bunuelian tricksters
like Raul Ruiz. These film-makers have propelled me into
the directions of seeking images and sounds which
critique the humanistic foundations of western culture.

My influences have been Jean Paul Fargier Robert
Cahen The Vasulkas Gary Hill Bill Viola and certain
works by Terry Flaxton George Snow and Mona
Hatoum. to name a few American video and
performance artists like Peter Campas Vito Aconcci
Ken Koblin Lynne Hershman Joan Jonas and Tony
Oursler have been instrumental in shaping my ideas
about video performance. It seems that as an artist I'm
caught between the two vector forces of contemporary
European and American video

In terms of British video art. I'm very conscious of the
cultural and aesthetic importance of Brilish scratch
video Having seen Ian Breakwell perform some of his
narratives, this has also stressed the importance upon

me of narrativity in video and electronic arts generally. In
fact, I think narrativity itself is going to be re-negotiated
with the current and future development of interactive
arts. I am also respectful of Jeremy Welsh because he
is that rare person who works as an artist/writer/theorist/
educator/curator/critic: always trying to combine many
different concerns at the same time It's always a source
of constant dialectical |uggling And finally, there is
David Larcher who, like Fargier and Cahen has had an
extraordinary impact on my ideas about electronic
collage and mixing media - 'cine-video'

You often collaborate with other artists in the
production of single channel work and or
installations. Could you comment on this activity
and its importance to you?

Collaboration for me so far has been central to my
practice as an image-maker be it in terms of cinema of
video and installation For me. I work with collaborators,
who have similar, or empathetic ideas to me in terms of
world views and conceptual frameworks. It doesn't
mean I seek clones out ihere, but I work with people I
regard as friends first, then as professional
collaborators. For me. what is crucial for artistic
collaboration is borne from intimate, conceptual and
emotional dialogue

What is your interest in video installation?

I like creating auto-biographical, cross-cultural spaces
and theatrical spaces whereby the spectator can
circumnavigate the audio-visual concerns of an
installation in an interactive sense.

I like the idea of motivating the body of the spectator as
much as using my own body in constructing
installations. In the context of contemporary European
avant-garde artforms, the body as a source of anti-
binary, open-ended knowledge apropos of Deleuze and
Gualtan and others going back to someone like Artaud
seems crucial for my approach to video installation

I also like working with the dramaticity and plasticity ol
video inslallations. I like creating assemblages -
machinic assemblages of plastic forms and conceptual
mtertextual spaces and concerns. I agree with Rene
Payant that video installations are complex sites of
multiple knowledges and multi-layered architectural
forms I've always been interested - irrespective of the
medium be it literature, cinema, video - in multiple
phantasmic spaces Installations link together high and
low art, art and technology, public and private spaces,
in our post-media' epoch

Also installation is significant in the sense of my ideas
that go back to my cinema background in terms of mise-
en-scene. of creating a multi-faceted theatrical space, of
performance styles, speech, philosophical ideas and
experimental ideas in terms of movement. I love the
choreography of the invisible; the unlolding of the
invisible. That to me is one of the main ideas in forming
my artistic practice and theoretical writings Movement,
be it say in a Chris Marker movie or movement in terms
of Thierry Kuntzels or in The Vasulkas' work.
Movement for me emphasises the thematics of the
surrealist notion of possibilities of rupturing everyday
life If you move your mind and your body and you
transgress the here and now in terms of your (un)
consciousness, movement can have untold dimensions
to it.

POSITIVE

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Artists
Statements

Controlled Substances II: Fourteen Days in
Liverpool

Bluecoat Gallery
New Commission

Jon Bewley (UK)

Born 24.03.56. Lives and works in Newcaslle-upon-

Tyne. England

I lived lor two weeks in rented accommodation in
Liverpool. During this period, in the course ol natural
events, I met a number of different people After my
departure they were invited to construct a portrait of me
using advanced portable computer technology.

This piece consists of laser print outs from Notebook
PC. Model 2000 System Package. This is a portable
device used to construct portraits for use by. security
and police forces

A limited edition prim Controlled Substances It Fourteen Days in
Liverpool has been designed and produced by Mark Haywood
and Jon Bewley and is available from Bluecoat Gallery

Selected Exhibitions

1991 Objects from the pocket of a man with more than one

identity, mixed media sculpture, Post Morality. Kettles Yard

& Cambridge Darkroom, Oxford.
1990 Untitled, sculpture in the Art Creating Society Symposium.

MOMA in Oxford
1990 Controlled Substances, mixed media installation, TYNE

INTERNATIONAL, Tyne and Wear

This is a Bluecoat Gallery Live Art Commission funded by the
ACGB

White Light

Tate Gallery Liverpool

New Commission

John Conomos David Haines (Australia)

John Conomos was born in 1947 David Haines was born

in 1966

The Nineteenth Century European author/explorers ol the
Antipodes sought to dominate the country from its vast
rugged coastline to its inner desert regions Their
obsessive quest for 'the great inland sea' epitomised a
conquistadorial Old World approach to reading and
subjugating Australian geography

White Light reconstructs the visual technology of the
camera obscura used in Nineteenth Century Antipodean
exploration and mapping, and plays upon the intense
psychotic experiences undergone by the colonial
explorers in their journeys.

White Light also questions the notion of the Sublime in
landscape which is evident in Western art, literature and
thought. Too often the Australian landscape is
represented as a site for Australianess'. Eurocentric
ideologies, orientalism and nature White Light's highly
abstract and self-reflexive images of Australian
landscape and its murmuring sound track of excerpts
from the journals of these explorers and from Spinoza
embody this important idea that is starting to surface in
(local) cultural criticism and audio-visual production.

White Light is preoccupied with the notion of landscape
as estrangement. The colonial explorers of Terra
Australis were drifting travellers caughl in a spiral of
delirium and obsession, seeking Western rationality in
uncharted spaces. It is in this context that White Light
also evokes Spinoza's ecological ideas on our
environment as a field of forces, of natures made up of all
kinds of interaction Maybe our explorers felt like
becoming - trees, rocks, creatures, etc White Light
speaks of these intense states of human existence.

This installation consists of 1 large wooden box, 1 lens, 1 book, t
screen, 1 liquid display video projector. 2_U-Matic decks, 1 amp
and 4 speakers

Selected Collaborative Exhibitions

1992 Museum of Fire, three pari video work with Christopher
Caines Australian Centre tor Photography, included in:
SECOND LANGUAGE. Institute of Modern An. Brisbane;
NEW VISIONS. Glasgow. VIDEOFEST 92, Berlin

1991 Untitled, mixed-media installation. Camera Lucinda, Sydney.

1990 The Algebra of Stars, video installation. Video Forms:
Passages in Identity, THE 4th AUSTRALIAN VIDEO
FESTIVAL. Sydney.

Supported by the Australia Council tor the Arts.

Men of Vision: Lenin and Marat

Tale Gallery Liverpool

Peter Callas (Australia)

Bom 30.5.52 Lives and works in Australia and Japan

Two large hollow three dimensional representations of
the heads ol Lenin and Marat are installed within a large
dark space. Two LCD video pro|ectors are located
inside each head These project outward Ihrough the
eyes of the visionaries' onto four silhouette screens
which are suspended from the ceiling As the audience
walks Ihrough the space around these images, they
experience the sensation of walking through layers of
history, as if actually confronting each figure A highly
layered fifth projection represents a kind of group
portrait of the mechanics of revolution'. On turning from
this final image, the viewer is confronted with the two
faces of Lenin and Marat, staring back with the glow of
the projector lamps apparent in their eyes.

The specially shaped screens are suspended and filled
with animated movements These moving sequences all
suggest 'revolution' in the classical meaning of the
word. The four suspended images are in different ways
a solution lo this problem of the ambivalence of
objective and subjective points of view in the protection
of images. In many senses the Soviet revolution is over
and we can only now discover its 'true' outline In the
same sense as realising the outline of a conversation
This termination has also meant that boundaries and
borders (other words for outlines) are all hotly contested
at the moment.

The fabricated heads camouflage the origin of the
image - or rather they substitute one perceived origin
(its point of manufacture) with another (the fantasised

owners' of these Images). As technologies, such as
video, are never neutral, we need to be constantly
conscious of their origins both in terms of their

archaeology' as the German theorist Kitller has pointed
out. and in terms of their point of manufacture. So we
could ask 'who has the propriety right over the images
we picture in and through technology?

The Sufferance

Bluecoat Gallery
New Commission

Lei Cox (UK)

Born 3.9.65 Lives and works in Dundee. Scotland

My current work is closer lo painting and photomontage:
it is electromontage or electrography I use video
equipment to record the subject. Then, when I find the
right action, I drop a few seconds into a digital video
paints system It's like vacuuming You suck up hundreds
of frames of the model or scene and empty the bag and
chose the exact picture sequence. This means I can
work wilh non-professionals, who look and are exactly
right for the piece

The Sufferance draws references from classical painters
such as Rembrandt Michaelangelo Leonardo de Vinci
and Pouisson and their crucifixion scene paintings By
looking at their colours, composition and narration, I have
built a seven screen video piece to re-create a modern
crucifixion The piece contains enjoyment and
punishment acting as a warning for contemporary man
and woman There are. however, overtones of a Zen-like
optimism of continual growth with hints of rebirth. The
piece directly follows on from my video portrait work and
in some ways is a full, life size video painting

The five electrographs on show are presented as colour
photos but they also exist as video looped moving pieces
that are intended to be hung in the gallery behind false
walls, in framed monitors. Some of these works can be
presented as short television art pieces that contain
linear narrative and musical accompaniment

The images on show have been montaged and multi-
layered using Ouantel hardware platforms and
reproduced electronically on slide film The film is then
placed under a conventional enlarger and processed on
photographic paper It feels good to collect portraits,
backgrounds and subjects, to put them in an archive until
the time is right to make a picture. It's more like painting
and photography

This Installation consists of 7 monitors, 7 U-Malic decks, 1 sync
starter.

Selected Exhibitions

#

1991 Selected Screenings, Kunsiverein. Cologne

1990 1si BIENNIAL OF THE MOVING IMAGE, Relna Sotia.

Madrid
1989 Retrospective Screenings. The Museum ot Modern Art. New

York

Selected Exhibitions

1992 Encubes. VIDEOFORMES 92. Clermont Ferrand. France
1991 Magnification Maximus. VIDEO POSITIVE 91. Tate Gallery

Liverpool. England.
1990 Giant, stage set installation tor dance group, louring Uk

Supported by the Scottish Arts Council. Ouantel and The
Television Workshop. Duncan of Jordanstone College.

In the Realm of the West Wind

Bluecoat Gallery

Ingo Giinther (Germany)
Lives in New York. USA

In this installation twin banners on flagpoles are blown
towards each other. They are not flags themselves
since their images change constantly Often, one will
seem to become the flag of the United States of
America, the other, that of the former Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics At other limes these false flags'
show the images of those nations' leaders and events
specific to each country

This work commemorates the swan song of the USSR
and the birth of the alleged 'New World Order'. The
world is being swept by two opposite tendencies:
Globalisation and Retribalisation. The question of which
of these forces will prevail, or if they will exist
simultaneously has yet to be answered.

In a Retribalised world, the flag is the ultimate collective
symbol which represents one's entire political unit:
one's tribe. To dishonour the flag, is to attack the tribe.
To fall beneath one's flag is to die a martyr Whereas, in
a sanitised, homogenised, consumer-safe global world,
the flag is transformed from symbol into an empty sign
ultimately representing nothing In a global market such
differences are interchangeable.

As Eastern Europe returns to the prejudices of the
Thirties, so the Red Banner, with its identifying hammer
and sickle, occupies the same position in world memory
as does the double headed eagle of Imperial Austria
The United States of America, is desperately searching
for something to give it a sense of identity. While many
nations have contributed to the American melting pot,
Retribalisation in the USA seems to be taking shape
along ethnic or socio-cultural lines rather than
according to the model of old world nationalism.

Text taken from copy by Peter Blackhawk' von Brandenburg.
(March 15. 1992. NYC)

City of Angels

Tate Gallery Liverpool

Catherine Ikam (France)

(in collaboration with Louis Fieri)

7 am looking for the face I had before (he world was
made. ' WB Yeats

Today, 'intermediate' or synthesised beings and virtual
environments interfere more and more with reality. The
frontiers between the 'real' and the 'simulated' question
our modes of perception.

City of Angels (La Cite des Anges) is a creative
metaphor for these new sensory spaces - described by
writers such as Philip K Dick and William Gibson It
goes back to the ancient belief in the existence of a City
of Angels (a society organised by messengers
mediating between gods and men) which is present in
religions throughout the world. This installation Is also
partly dedicated to the film Blade Runner. It shows two
generations of artificial beings programmed to pursue
each other endlessly.

It is this universe of parallel realilies, of synthetic beings,
half-artificial, half-human which has inspired my work for
several years: From Device for a Video Journey
(Dispositif pour un Parcours Video ), created at
Beaubourg in 1980, which reflected a fragmented
image of ourselves exploding into space, through to the
virtual environment of L Autre, created in 1992 for the
Foundation Cartier, which illustrates an interactive
meeting in real time with a computer-sculpted face, I
have continued to search for the other side of ourselves,
that which reveals to us the encounter between these
intermediate beings which are, for me, modern day
angels.

This commission is a modified version of a new piece originally
produced for VIDEOFEST In Berlin, February 1993.

This video installation consists of 8 monitors, 4 U-Matic decks. 8
wooden plinths. 1 sync starier. amplifier and speakers

Catherine Ikam is a painter, photographer and multi-media artisl
who exhibits internationally. Over the past twelve months, Ikam
has become increasingly interested In virtual environments in
which the spectator is part of Ihe work.

Louis Fieri is an author, producer and director, he is notably co-
author with Catherine Ikam of L'Auture and of a monumental
video sculpture Fountain of Images {Fontaine d'lmages).

This installation consists of 2 laserdisc players, 2 liquid crystal
video projectors, 2 fans, 2 flagpoles

Supported by the Goethe-lnstitut.

Selected Exhibitions

1993 Images du Futur 93 Cite des Nouvelles Technologies,

Montreal.
1992 ■Pixel Art' French Pavilion, Expo' 92, Seville, Spain
1991 Pierre Restany. le Coeur et la Raison' Musee des Jacobins

a Morlaix. France.

Supported by the Service Culture! de L'Ambassade de France
Delegation Culturelle Francaise a Manchester

A Bone to Pick

Bluecoal Gallery
New Commission

Shirley MacWilliam (Norlhern Ireland)

Born 13 11 66 Currently based in Liverpool as

MOMART artist in residence at Tate Gallery Liverpool

The material of A Bone to Pick was made during a
period of return in Northern Ireland (funded as part of
Diaspora, organised by Living Art Projects, Dublin).

There is an expectation of privacy, associated with
'home', which can reveal itself, in certain circumstances,
as an insistent sense of territory The strategies used to
shore up a cultural security (or territory) encompass any
number of defences, complicity, protestations of
'innocence', the determined activity of 'keeping your
head down'. The work is pitched at a level of sensation
in its attempt to deal with the experience of these
coping mechanisms The deaf nettle (on dry land) and
the knotted wrack (in the wet) heckle the blind spot
between the eyes.

Installation consisting of several light-boxes. 1 monitor and 4
speakers.

No Colouring Can Deepen
The Darkness of Truth
Walker Art Gallery

Alanna O'Kelly (Republic of Ireland)

Born 9.12.55 Lives in Dublin, Republic of Ireland.

From a series of works: The Country Blooms

A Garden and a Grave

For a long time I have known of a need
to take a look at the great Irish Famine of 1846-1848.
The interest has been to do with this incredible event
as a time of absolute change for us on this island.

The changes wrought on our language, our culture, our

psyche,

continue to impact on us as contemporary realities.

The issues of the Great Famine are alive
monumental and devastating, here are areas
of immense sadness, anger, humiliation,
confusion, dignity and healing

Our families' stories, memories,

unspoken pain, fear and hurt lie everywhere.

Patterns of history repeating themselves -

Our story, yet, hardly talked about

displaced, unsettled, denied and dispossessed.

A scattered people

we share with others this despised experience.

Similar conditions continue to write new Histories today.

A common story we can begin to recognise,

A common ground to heal.

Alanna O'Kelly,
Dublin, Sept 1992

This installation consists ot 3 27' monitors, 3 decks and one sync
starter

Selected Exhibitions

1992 This Meere (sound installation) Cheltenham Fellows Show.
Pittville Gallery. Cheltenham.

1992 Swarm (multi-monitor and sound installation) LINE ONE
VIDEO FESTIVAL, Prema Arts Centre, Uley,
Gloucestershire

1991 embrace (multi-monitor and sound installation) Camera-
work. London.

The Observatory

Tate Gallery Liverpool

Simon Robertshaw (UK)

Born 28 10 60. Lives and works in Liverpool.

The Observatory is the third in a series of installations:
From Generation to Generation (1989). Bio Optic (1991 )
being the first ol the two.

Many of my previous video tapes and installations have
involved working directly with individuals, groups within
psychiatric and special care and related issues. By
understanding the complex histories of such institutions
and the views represented by the hierarchy of
medicine, I realised that this power/knowledge structure
has developed throughout culture.

Theoretically, my work has been informed through the
writings of Michel Foucault who in turn has led me to the
work of Jeremy Bentham. In 1795. Bentham devised an
architectural design/mechanism named The
Pantopticon or Inspection House. This was a circular
building with cells at the periphery and a central
viewing tower from which a superintendent could keep
the building under surveillance

The Observatory is based on The Pantopticon and
inlormed by a number ol other discourses and
technologies. Sir Francis Gallon's Iheory of Eugenics'
devised in 1883 refers to a mathematical analysis of
heredity His aim was to improve the human race by
statistically calculating those groups of people which he
believed should be prevented from breeding. The
discovery of DNA has enabled scientists to map all the
genes which make up a person For many scientists.
DNA holds the key to human heredity offering the
identification and intervention of potential diseases and
disabilities within the human body As with Ihe Iheory ol
Eugenics, so DNA based diagnoses are based on
statistical prediction.

It is this reductionist view, evident in both Eugenics and
the philosophy of DNA, argues that we are composed of
small elements making up the larger picture Such a
beliel negates any intrusion by consciousness,
environment, culture or even history This split, between
nature and nurture, remains predominant in biology and
science.

This installation consists of 7 perspex panels. 7 glass panels, 8
sensors, 7 slide projectors and 1 liquid display video proiector

Oracle

Tate Gallery Liverpool
New Commission

Barbara Steinman (Canada)

Born 3.2.54 Lives and works m Montreal, Canada.

Sand passing through an hourglass in real time plays on
the monitors in a continuous cycle of filling and
emptying. There is a hiss of sand against glass made
from different tracks of breathing.

A voice is heard telling fortunes through ihe speakers
encircling the monitors. 'Forgive and forget' may follow
Let the past guide your future'

This installation consists ot 6 monitors and 12 speakers

Selected Solo Exhibitions

1992 Uncertain Monuments. Galerie Rene Bloutn, Montreal.

Mackenzie An Gallery. Regma.

1991 Promissory Notes the Banff Centre for the Arts. Banfl

Galene Rene Biouin. Montreal

1990 Museum of Modern Art, New York (video installation)

Mandeville Gallery, La Jolla, California.

Supported by Canadian External Affairs

This is a Moviola/Oriel 31/Wrexham Arts Centre cO'Commission
lunded by the ACGB

The Conditions

Tate Gallery Liverpool
New Commission

Weightless

Open Eye Gallery
New Commission

Andrew Stones (UK)

Born 7 1.60 Lives and works in Sheffield, England.

The Conditions extends a range of concerns
established in past works such as Geiger (1989).
Common Knowledge (1989), A History of Disaster with
Marvels (1992) and Flare/Cataract (1992). A fascination
with science and its history is articulated alongside a
sense of ambivalence regarding the more over-arching
claims of academia The work raises certain issues: that

knowledge' is not neutral: that technology and science
accrue political overtones In their cultural context: that
progress by these means is not inevitable, and neither
can the history of this progress be represented to us in
an absolute form.

The characterisation of Nature as a separate realm of
conditions' impinging on an heroic human domain of
intellect is now commonly questioned in the light of
environmental politics and ethical crisis. Human action
contributes to surrounding conditions, which in turn
affect further action. Progress cannot endlessly,
neutrally push out into a finite world the world pushes
back.

In The Conditions a recurrent, iconic human presence
appears in a panoramic video projection, alongside
various terrains, forest, desert, solar atmosphere Points
of reference in a parallel academic terrain' are also
presented, both in the video element of the work and in
large, slowly turning 'cosmologies' cast by OHP units:
stages of Robert Fludd's eloquent 17th Century
cosmology. 19th Century herbalism: popular
encyclopediae and anatomical works. Elements such as
equipment, cabling and racking are foregrounded in a
geometric representation of anatomy.

Selected Exhibitions

1993 Cass, installation. Kunst-Werke, Berlin VIDEOFEST, first

shown ai Ihe Harris Gallery, Preston in 1990
1 992/93 A History of Disaster with Marvels, videotape broadcast

by Channel 4; screened internationally including Ihe 2nd

ICA Biennial of Independent Rim and Video tour.
1992 Flare/Cataract, large-scale installations, SHEFFIELD

FESTIVAL
1990 The Tide, large-scale installation, Posterngate Gallery,

Hull
1989 Geiger. installation, Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield

Harvest Festival, Installation, VIDEO POSITIVE89.

Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool

Common Knowledge. videotape screened

internationally

Jonathan Swain (UK)

Virgo Lives in Brighton, England.

In 1969, whilst circling the earth at sixty miles a second,
Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut informed a relieved
ground control that he could see no physical signs of a
god. Perhaps his mind was befuddled by all the
technology, dizzied by the centrifugal force or maybe he
lust wasn't looking en the right place. Twenty something
years later, due to the political crisis in the former Soviet
Union, the economic problems of NASA and the
complete lack of a British space programme, we present
a gallery based exploration into Star Wars technology,
nol research, but a dance into We/ghf/essness

A two machine video dance piece.

Produced in collaboration with Mike Carney who is a freelance
dancer and lilm maker Julienne Lorz who is a Liverpool based
dancer and choreographer currently working on several
collaborative works.

Funded by the ACGB.

Funded by the ACGB

Anger and Grace

New Commission

Cathy Vogan (France)

Born in Britain Permanent resident in Australia for 17

years. Presently living and working in Paris, France

As my work has developed, death, the unconscious,
dreams, other-worldliness, odd behaviour, strange
journeys, the limits of knowledge and madness have
become the key issues, but these are evoked in
courtship with an audio-visual river of life-flowing
energy All is strange and uncertain in such a world -
our world - bul for the certainty of life's rhythm, and whal
better a medium to imitate and conserve 'life than with
the freakish properties of video - at 25fps, a veritable
psychological presence! In reference to the old man in
my latest award-winning tape Methuselah, who is also
featured here in Anger and Grace. I speak of Ihe
concept of play'

I press that button and it's as if no time has passed

since we recorded Ihis; this image

Bears no print of Time.

Methuselah lives.

Undead

Loopy for all eternity

In ferromagnetic orbit around the great planet

Tapehead

Read me between the frames.

This is a multi-media installation comprising 3 U-matic players, 2
small monitors. 4 large monitors, computerised dispatched
system, 2 synchronisers (video and lighting/motors). 1
grandfather clock. 1 birdcage, 1 small table, 1 window-frame. 1
old couch, 2 motors, lighting and additional decor

In the last 9 years Cathy Vogan has created 9 single tapes and 9
video Installations, and since her arrival in France in 1987, has
collaborated with her partner Dominik Barbier. on several large-
scale spectacles', while founding and participating in the
development of the Paris-based Fearless Studio for the Electronic
Arts in which she operates as anist/director and online editor.

Corpus

Open Eye Gallery

Richard Wright (UK)

Born 6.9.63. Lives in Barnet and works at the City of

London Polytechnic, England

Highly sophisticated technological machinery such as
computing and digital processing devices are
beginning to blur the distinction between the organic
and the inorganic. Along with 'artificial intelligence' we
now hear the phrase 'artificial lile'. yel it is never made
entirely clear in what sense these qualities have been
made 'artificial' The mysteries of the body are still
unresolved after their reduction to the metaphor of the
machine and now that technology is developing a
mythology of its own, we continue to ask the question
What am I?' in an age when the very nature of
knowledge has changed

Corpus is a video installation designed to simulate a
body submerged under water and engaged in an act of
sell-examination using computer animation The image
Is broken up digitally Into four separate video monitors
with each able to be manipulated independently. The
spectator is able lo move each unit around separately
like a jigsaw puzzle, thereby changing their
configurations so as to produce a perceptual rupture or
perform video surgery' on the integrity of the computer
simulated figure

The monitors are placed on a circular base on which
reproductions from Vesalius' De Human! Corporis
Fabrica are printed. These anatomical drawings, which
heralded the beginnings of modern empirical science,
are edited together to make a kind of physiological
map With the aid of light-bulbs, the cabinets are turned
into two-way tunnels of light, by which the animated
figure on the top surface can be perceived to result
from some technological transformation applied to Ihe
drawings underneath, or as some kind of telescopic
sight which stimulates the objects it passes over into
some kind of frenetic half-life.

This installation consists of 1 wooden base. 4 monitors, 4 U-Matic
decks and 1 sync starter

Selected Exhibitions

1993 Monstres Synlhereeis. VIDEOFEST 93. Berlin

1992/1 Complicity. Aspects de la Sculpture Video'. Monpgllier

1 989/90 No Way Buster Project, co-directed by Dominik Barbier,

VIDEO ART PLASTIQUE. 5° Manifestation International

Video et TV, Montbeliard

Selected Videography

1992 Corpus. Computer animation

1991 Superanimism. (with Jason White) Computer animation

1987 Studies in Rhythm. Computer animation

Funded by the ACGB

The

Collaboration

Programme

The Collaboration
Programme is a large-scale
project unique in Britain,
working regionally within
communities and formal
education.

Electronic Media Art
practitioner, and Animateur
Louise Forshaw, has invited
several other practitioners to
join her in work with the
following groups. The result
is the premiere presentation
of seven installation's, one
re-staging and four new
single channel tape works; a
progressive and inspired
complement to the
programme of international
artists.

Seven installations are sited
at the Grand Hall, Albert
Dock. Liverpool and one
within N.A.C.R.O. which is
located in St Vincents
Centre, Greetham Street,
Liverpool.

Ashworth (North) Hospital.

Maghull

Patients group

The Sell. Self Image

The work on exhibition has been
put togethei by a group ot
individuals wilh a range of views
on their self images. Some had
never operated a video camera
before, most had not had the
opportunity to produce video art
before and experience it's use in
communicating a message.

Alter several week's working
through the human image in his
environment, we progressed to
individual images that we lelt were
pertinent to us.

The iinished result is our
statement, hopefully it will transmit
a message to the viewer Either
way the experience has meant a
lot to us 1 ' The Patients Group.

The group had a positive
commitment to the project Much
thought and energy went into what
they saw as a unique opportunity
to make their own statement and
contribution to Video Positive
1993

Collaborators include:

Patients Group

Simon Robertshaw

Ruth Preece (Arts Co-ordmator)

Brenda Jones (Patient Education)

Knowsley Community College

School of Art & Design. Prescot

Centre

Pre-Degree Foundation Course

BIOSPHERE

Initially, we the group arrived at the
idea of the North and South of
Britain, each having their own
ambience After thinking about the
differences, we reached the
concept of producing two rooms,
no longer purely depicting the
Norlh and South but the
contrasting paces of life and the
juxtaposed environments in which
they exisl - one room reckless and
claustrophobic, the other relaxed
and open.

They appeared to us as iwo (Bio)
miniaturised worlds (spheres) with
separate identities, and
atmospheres hence BIOSPHERE'.

BIOSPHERE is not an illustrated
version of the two opposing
worlds, more an abstract
representation of our feelings and
experiences.

The Installation is designed to
provoke emotions of a similar
nature to our own. through sight,
sound and touch

Collaborators include
Gillian Birch. Richard Bryson.
Josef Cannon Ann Dodd. Louise
Forshaw. Steven Gibson. Chris
McCabe. Sarah Murphy. Alan
Perkin. Philip Rhami. Richard
Thomas, Stuart Walsh.

Merseyside Centre For The Deaf
Silentview

Life After Deal

At a seance, three deaf people
call on the spirit of their fellows
past, present and future to advise
Ihem on living in a hearing world
In this near Deaf experience the
participants use Sign Language to
learn from each other the means of
living, and self expression.

Sign Language provides continuity
for Deaf people throughout the
ages, from which they draw
strength and identity

This inward looking installation
requires the viewer to shoulder
their way into the meeting if they
are to be fully involved

In practical terms this has been an
opportunity for members of Ihe
group to learn more about
technology, whilst working
together with other deaf people,
exploring the possibilities of video
as an artistic expression

Collaborators include-
Glen Campbell. Kathy Cockburn,
Gillian Fitzgibbon. Adam Gill.
Shaun Hamblett. Betty Harvey,
Gary Hunter, Colin Johnson,
Barry Kirwan, Barry Mclntyre,
Jennifer Sealey

NACRO

Greetham Street, Liverpool

Breakfast. Dinner, and TV

The theme of the installation is a
Couch Potato character getting
his/her daily dose ol television.
This takes place in a living room
setting with three monitors
arranged around the room The
screens depict and comment on
the Couch Potato's daily diet

Past and Present TV aims to take
the viewer through the years
Keeping to a comedy theme this
entails collecting snippets of
programmes from the early Fifties
through the Sixties. Seventies.
Eighties and into the Nineties.
This reveals how Couch Potato's
humour has changed over the
years and how television has
played it's part in shaping that.

Video Box on the other hand
depicts Couch Potato's view of
television in general This piece
takes Couch Potato from sunrise to
switch off time with an array of
programmes on screen one,
interviews with the viewing public
on screen two and comments from
people and sheep on screen
three.

TV Funding gives Couch Potato
insight into how he/she pays for
his/her diet of television. Using the
three screens as reels of a slot
machine this piece shows where
money for programmes comes
from and goes to. Each spin of the
reels will show the wins, losses
and risks of programme making

Collaborators include:
Ruth Adams. Peter Appleton,
Simon Barrington, Adrian
Borkwood, Julie Borkwood. Joe
Braithwaite, John Carragher,
Jason Carragher, Alan Condon.
Mark Fleming. Sarah Haynes,
Dave McCourt. Phil Murphy.
Amanda Neary. Justin Quarless.
Corrina Robinson, Mark Scott,
Duncan Walker

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St Helens Community College
Women Into Media

PMTV

PMTV invites you to step into our
alternative TV world, come with us
as we channel-hop through a
selection of our programmes.

Be amazed by the brilliance and
innovation; no more mediocre TV
PMTV is produced by women with
serious talent. Relax and enjoy
programmes which challenge,
educate and promise to stretch
your imagination.

Highlights include:

A look at the world of politics in
'Unlucky For Us' - A propaganda
video issuing statements about the
'achievements' over a thirteen year
period, of a western democratic
government', by C Thornton.

'A personal interpretation of how
the TV has an effect on our lives ',
by J Manzanilla

And the arts... 'Dead Meat' -
Fragmented female body parts
illustrate how the media never
treats women as whole people ' .
by R Johnson.

But ask yourself 'Are you watching
the TV - or is it watching you?'
Women into Media.

Collaborators include:
Karen Baker. Sharon Collins.
Victoria Conroy. Emma Decent.
Jean Ebblewhite. Candice
Fonseca. Louise Forshaw.
Rebecca Johnson, Susan Joyce.
Janice Manzanilla, Jacky
McKenna. Eimer O'Hare.
Catherine Robinson, Katherine
Roocroft. Christine Thornton,
Helen Turner, Jean Ward, Dawn
Williams

Southport College
General Art &
Design/Foundation Students

Sight Specific

Together, we are a group of nine
students, and Sight Specific is the
result of a collaboration of our
individual ideas on how we
perceive our environment.

It consists of a number of monitors
placed face up on the floor of the
space, in random configuration
As our work has been created with
the advantage of multiple
viewpoints, the viewer is invited to
make a path of their own choice
within our installation. The imagery
and sound runs on a specific lime
cycle, representing both what is
under the surface, and the
progression of lime within nature.
Surface' in this instance being
grass, which acts as a
metaphorical carpet' under which
issues are swept, only to rise again
in another manifestation.

The Images and sounds which
occur at intervals within the cycle
of the video, are the concerns and
input of each individual in the
group Through a series of
discussions around the agreed
theme of the installation, we have
contributed to the development of
each other's ideas throughout the
production.

Collaborators include
Adam Bell. Steven Boland
Graham Cleminson. Robert
Dodd. Louise Forshaw, Sue
Gray, Stephen Maddock. Alison
Porter. Sarah Schofield, John
Whitelaw

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Training and Vocational
Education Initiatives
Sandwell West Midlands

Chicology (Re-Staging)

Chicology is one of a range of
installations produced during the
Art Related Technologies
residential course, designed by
TVEI in collaboration with Moviola,
and held at Ingestre Hall
Residential Arts Centre,
Staffordshire during July 20th-23rd
1992.

The course provided the
opportunity for twenty arts
students (Post 16) in Sandwell,
and twenty Higher Education
students to engage in exploring
new technologies and the arts,
using video as the central medium

Produced by three participants on
the course. Chicology was
inspired by the writing's within a
Victorian book taken from the
library at Ingestre Hall entitled How
to be a well dressed Wife

Collaborators included:
Jane Coalter PGCE Student.
University of Central England
Jaswinder Kaur Khera 6th Form
Pupil, Wood Green High School
Kerry Steen 6th Form Pupil, Wood
Green High School

Electronic Media Art Practitioners:
Louise Forshaw. Clive Gillman,
Lisa Mooney. Ruth Patchett,
Pete Worrall.

Ingestre Hall Residential
Practitioners: Maria Buckley.
Darrell Wakelam, David Gowar

Art Related Technologies
Organisers Tim Wright Advisor
Art & Design Cathy Village &
John Ward TVEI Co-ordinators

Re-stage Set Design. Jaqueline
French.

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University Ot Central Lancashire
Fine Art/Time Based Media
Students

'Quality Value'
RE; VIEW

ASSUME, AUTHORITY,
CENSORSHIP, CODES,
COLLABORATE, CONNOTATION,
CONTROL, DECONSTRUCT,
DELETE, DENOTE, DISTORT,
EDIT, EMOTIVE, EXCLUDE.
FABRICATE, INFORM, JUDGE,
LANGUAGE, LIES. MANIPULATE,
MEDIA, MIS-INFORM.
NARRATIVE, NEWS, QUESTION,
RE-CONSTRUCT, SEMIOTICS,
SUBLIMINAL. SYMBOLIC, TASTE.
TRUTH, VISUAL.

Collaborators included:
Karen Allison. Sophie Black.
Diane Clarke. Barbara Connolly,
David Faragher, Laurie Keith,
Haley Magee. Llinos Owen, Neil
Percival, Jane Smith. Katy
Suggitt, Bernie Velvick

The Collaboration Programme : S ingle Tape Projects

Screened within Recorded Delivery at Unity Theatre.

Age Concern St Helens with
Parr Community High School

My Age. Your Attitude

We are a group comprising older people Irom a day
centre run by Age Concern St Helens, and pupils trom
Parr Communily High School As 1993 is European Year
of Older People and Solidarity between Generations' we
called our projecl My Age. Your Attitude with the
intention that it reflects opinions from both age groups

We have identified and expressed various experiences
in the lives of members of the groups, in an attempt to
challenge ageist stereotypes. This is a rare opportunity
for us to get our views across, as well as learning new
skills and boosting confidence

Age is no barrier to participating in a creative initiative

Collaborators include
Josane Alexander. May
Burrows, Joanne
Butterworth. Jon
Carsberg, Gill Ellison,
Jean Hand. Robert
Hussey. Esther Kain.
Kathy Pilkington, Julie
Shawbinns. Richard
Thompson. Joanne
Robinson, Mary

Aintree Youth Centre Oriel Drive

Our Generation

We are a group of young unemployed youlhs from
Aintree. who have been given the opportunity through
our local youth centre (unemployed club) and Moviola to
make a video of some kind.

We decided as a group to find out what people thoughl
of our generation. This will be an investigation into the
youth dance culture of the '90s using video, animation
and talking heads.

We produced ihis using our own knowledge and
experience of youth culture, and have made this for fun
and enjoyment, Through the video projecl we feel we
have developed personally with skills, knowledge, and
technical expertise to make something constructive and
positive about Ihe image of our generation

We feel we would prefer to spend our time doing
something constructive, enjoyable and interesting, rather
than just hanging around doing nothing

Collaborators include:

David Bretland, Ian Collins. Marc Connolly. Jimmy

Cunningham, Adele Maddocks, Paul Niblock, Colin

Weir

Litherland Boys Club
Crosby

Psycho Cyclists'

We have previously shot a number ol short videos at the
club culminating in a 20 minute documentary drama
about drugs. The aim of this project is to build on this
experience, developing the groups technical skills and
to learn about editing.

The video is about a group of us meelmg up and going
out on our bikes. The viewer is taken on a lour of the
Crosby area to places like Ihe marina, canal and wood,
interspersed with fast action shots of wheelies, lumps,
and skids. It's all about showing young people enjoying
themselves and creating positive images ol Crosby.

Collaborators

include:

Karl

Bradshaw,

Ben Dailey,

Danny Dailey.

Antony Fisher.

Hayden

Griffith, Peter

Hankin, David

Pendleton,

Rebecca

Owen, Jane

Wood.

Sandfield Park School
Sandfield Walk

The Unbeatables

Reports are reaching us from all over the world lhat Mr
Badguy is trying to take over. In Washington he is
reported lo have painted ihe White House black. Nearer
to home in Liverpool Mr Badguy was last seen painting
the Liverbirds purple 1 '

The Unbeatables is a computer animation by the
students of Sandfield Park School Using the Amiga
Computer, we morphed ourselves into different elements
and objects. We had to share the computers and help
each other, so the cartoon and music is made by all of
us.'

Collaborators
include:

Priscilla Alozie,
Alan Bailey. Nicky
Bennett. Michael
Hawley. Diane
Hobbs. Tracy
Lang, Hayley
Murray, Julie
Myers. John
Smith. Mark
Stevens. Jane
Wood.

s
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R

N

I
N
G
S

All Screenings

at Unity

Thea tre

Gender and Technoculture

A compilalion of work Irom British
and American women artists using
technology to explore futuristic
fantasy scenarios and lived
experiences which challenge Ihe
assumption that advanced
technologies perpetuate a male-only
culture. Including recent works by
British artists such as Kathleen
Rogers, who in The Art of Losing
Memory traces the relationship
between low-tech lace-making and
high-tech computerised imaging
American artists Sandra Tail and
Gretschen Bender have produced
Volatile Memory. Starring Cindy
Sherman. Ihis proto-type cyberpunk
fiction has strong overtones of
William Gibson's contemporary novel
classic Neuromancer.

involuntary Conversion 9 mins
Jeanne Finley (USA) 1991

The Art of Losing Memory 9 mins
Kathleen Rogers (UK) 1991

Un-fit 1 mm

Jo Pearson (UK) 1992

Sleep 8 mtns

Catherine Elwes (UK) 1984

Volatile Memory 1 2 mins

Sandra Talt/Gretschen Bender (USA)

1989

The Houses that are Left 54 mins
Shelly Silver (USA) 1989

Curated by Steven Bode of Film and Video
Umbrella and Helen Cadwatlader

Work, Rest and PLAY >

This selective survey of recent video
and computer art produced in Britain
complements the launch of This Side
of Ihe Channel, this selective survey
of recent British video and computer
art. Entertaining, provocative, funny,
eclectic, even apocalyptic, these
tapes - from George Snow's
exhilarating road video Motorway to
The Dreaming, Herlinde Smet s
conceptual piece exploring
movement, light and space
evocative of Aboriginal mapping -
demonstrate the diversity and
ambition of video artists currently
working in Britain.

Motorway 20 mins
George Snow (UK) 1992

Pandemonium 5 mins
Simon Biggs (AUS) 1992
Proteus 8 mins
Robert Meek (UK) 1992

Many Scars 9 mins
Sophie Outram (UK) 1992

Edge 3 mins

Jo Pearson (UK) 1992

Bitter Root, Sweet Fruit 9 mins
Nicola Percy (UK) 1992

Proposition is a Picture 22 mins
Steve Hawley (UK) 1992

Losing 10 mins

Cllve Gillman (UK) 1992

The Dreaming 8 mins
Herlinde Smet (BEL) 1992

Work, Rest and Play 1 8 mins
Pictorial Heroes (UK) 1992

Curated by Eddie Berg and Helen
Cadwallader

This Side of the Channel
Programme Three

A ma|or UK electronic image
retrospective and state-of-the art
survey, taking in the best ol video
art. computer animation and creative
work for broadcast television This
programme logs into the constantly
shifting network of British computer
animation; a data-compressed
journey through some of the most
exciting and innovative
developments with the new
technologies The programme re-
presents the work of key
practitioners whose contribution to
the visual field has enriched our way
of seeing the world From totally
synthetic 'virtual' sculptures to
pixellated Tex Avery-style comic cul-
ups. This Side of the Channel's focus
on computer animation promises to
be one of the highlights of the VIDEO
POSITIVE 93 screenings series.

Featuring:

Evolution of Form 4 mins
William Latham (UK) 1988

Biogenesis 5 mins
William Latham (UK) 1993

Superammism 3 mins

Richard Wright Jason White (UK) 1991

First World Boutique 2 mins
John Butler (UK) 1993

Durational Painting 4 mins
Anna Spelling (UK) 1990

Peat People In Car Race' 6 mins
John Kay (UK) 1992

A New Life 4 mins
Simon Biggs (UK) 1989

The Cruel Eye 3 mins
Andy Budd (UK) 1991
Flux 4 mins
l.e (UK)

Curated by Steven Bode of Film and Video
Umbrella

This Side of the Channel
Programme Four
Virtual TV

Sit back, relax and prepare lo be
generally astounded by an
imaginary hour of Virtual TV. a (This
Side of The) Channel-hopping,
zappers delight. Sixty minutes ot the
most innovative work lo be tound on
British broadcast television.

Virtual TV showcases a number of
stand-out pieces in the art/exper-
imental television area (from series
like Ghosts in the Machine. One
Minute Television and The Dazzling
Image). These short works (along
with extracts from longer innovative
arts documentaries) are presented
alongside some of the most creative
ads, titles sequences and station
trailers etc made during the last few
years, demonstrating the increasing
cross-over between the
experimental' and the 'commercial'
arena and the continuing creative
standard of the best British TV-
oriented work.

Featuring:

La>e3~ow(Aie>teiSaylet-txa Tile Sequence) 1 rrri
Steve Bonnett/Kelth Haynes

First Direct ad 1 mm
Marc Ormes

TV Hell 'Sparks' 30 sees
Steve Bonnett/Keith Haynes

Late Show Woli/BR Fabrics sequence 4 mins
Steve Bonnett/Keith Haynes

A Short History of The Wheel I mins
Tony Hill

Trout Descending a Staircase 1 min
Steve Hawley

Celtic m Mind 4 mins

Rose Garrard

Ghosts in the Machine (Title sequence)20 sees

English Markell Pockett

The Assignation (extract) 3 mins
George Snow

A TV Dante (Canto 1) 1 1 mins
Peter Greenaway/Tom Phillips

TV Hell (It's a Knockout) 30 sees
Steve Bonnett/Keith Haynes

Hyperland b mins
Max Whitby

The Shock ol the Neo 2 mins
llluminations/Geoft Dunlop

South Bank Show 30 sees
Pat Gavin

Late Show Interlude 1 min
Steve Bonnett/Keith Haynes

Sentence 1 mm
Steve Partridge

Slooky Bill 4 mins
David Hall

Uncertainties 10 mins
Diverse Productions

Late Show Phonetic Alphabet 30 sees
Steve Bonnett/Kelth Haynes

Proust's Favourite Fantasy 1 min
Richard Kwietniowski/Roger Clarke

Manao Tupapao 1 min
Amanda Holiday

Seven Songs lor Malcolm X 7 mins
Black Audio Film Collective

Absurd 4 mins
John Maybury

Late Show 3 mins

Steve Bonnett/Keith Haynes

Curated by Steven Bode of the Film and
Video Umbrella and John Wyver (producer
TV Heaven)

Telling Stories
Scanners of Memory

(A selection ot recent video from
Australia)

Any programme of video as art
produced in the early 1990's is
linked to a history of highly creative
and personal experimental image
making. A hybrid artform, video is an
ever expanding modernist and
postmodernist discourse involving
notions of cultural production on a
global level

Since its early beginnings in the 60s
and '70s the electronic image of
video has evoked a transitional
experience of reality and artifice for
the spectator, creating dream worlds
ol temporal and spatial
manipulations where mass media
information is reconstructed as an
expression of the 'self and cultural
mythologies and the human
(sub)consciousness is fabricated
within systems of technological
exploration

Video can also combine processes
of technological manipulation with
low-tech equipment or the digital
integration of a diverse range of
post-production techniques This
rawness, coupled with paradoxical
confluences of mass media forms
and genres provides artists with a
radical and oppositional stance to
mainstream media culture. This is
evident in the following works. Test
by John Gillies and the Sydney
Front: K-Rad Man by Ian Haig; and /
Paint I Am by Michael Strum

In Museum of Fire by Chris Caines
John Conomos and David Haines
Down to the Line by Marshall White,

Sometimes by Suzi Alesandra and
Driving and Dreaming by Jane
Parkes the private self in the public
sphere is exposed. The video image
in close-up is linked by a face-to-
face narrative of every day rituals
and dreams (either spoken or as a
silenl rhythmic sub-text). This
intertextual experiment in
videographic inquiry subverts the
relationship between object and
subject, and the inherent control
governing our ability to view and
being viewed.

In Jill Scott's new work Paradise
Tossed the ironic artifice of digital
electronic imagining as a televisual
and allegorical intertextual rendering
of meditative landscapes of
domestic technology cannot be
avoided The direclness of this piece
is transformed into a surreal
investigation of female identity.

Featuring:

Museum of Fire 45 mins

David Haines John Conomos/Chris

Caines (AUS) 1991

Driving and Dreaming 4 mins
Jane Parkes (AUS) 1991

Sometimes 5 mins

Suzi Alesandra (AUS) 1992

Down to the Line 10 mins
Marshall White (AUS) 1992

Test 3 mins

John Gillies & the Sydney Front 1992

/ Paint I Am 1 min
Michael Strum (AUS) 1992

K-Rad Man 10 mins
Ian Halg (AUS) 1992

Paradise Tossed 1 3 mins
Jill Scott (AUS) 1992

VIDEO POSITIVE 93 acknowledges the
financial assistance of the Visual An/Craft
Board of the Australia Council and the
support of the Electronic Media Ans
(Australia) Ltd. Brian Langer the curatoi
and Ihe artists

Recorded Delivery

A compilation of tapes produced
through The Collaboration
Programme and other works
produced by young people from
across Europe. For details of The
Collaboration Programme tapes see
page fifty eight.

Featuring:

My Age. Your Attitude

Age Concern SI Helens Parr Community

High School 1993

Our Generation

Aintree Youth Centre 1993

Psycho Cyclists
Crosby Youth 1993

The Unbeatables 1 993
Sandfield Park

Curated by Louise Forshaw VIDEO
POSITIVE 93 Animateur

Sound (from To Camera)

When il first appeared over len years
ago, the promo for Talking Heads'
Once in a Lifetime, set a creative
standard for the newly-emerging
form of music video. Combining the
latesl in video technology alongside
innovative formal devices, it features
a show-stopping performance from •
head-Head David Byrne

The Eighties themselves saw a
number of artists who took the
music-video-and-performance
combo off in new experimental
directions John Sanborn s rivetting
Ear to the Ground (made with avant-
garde percussionisl David van
Tieghem) Akiko Hadas witty,
rapid-fire Ohi Ho Bang Bang and
Christian Marclay s Record Players
are all pieces that explore the
possibility of a new kind of 'visual-
music' in which the performance
fundamentally shapes the structure
of the soundtrack.

In recent years, the tendency for
collaborative projects by visual
artists and musicians/dancers is
represented in a number of dance-
based pieces, including those
directed by John Maybury. Mike
Stubbs and Pascal Baes which all
use the twists-and-turns of the
camera to add a dramatic new
element to the performance. The
programme closes with the recent
promo for David Byrne's She's Mad:
proof that Byrne has lost none of this

gift for virtuoso set-piece effects and
a fascinating glimpse of the potential
interaction of performance with the
world of digital and computer
technology

Featuring:

Once in a Lifetime 4 mins

David Byrne Once in a Lifetime (USA)

1982

In Re Don Giovanni 4 mins

Jeremy Welsh/Michael Nyman) (UK)

1982

Blue Dance 6 mms

Alter Image (UK) 1986

Ohi Ho Bang Bang 5 mins

Aklko Hada Holger Hlller (UK/GER) 1989

Topic I 5 mins

Pascal Baes (FR) 1990

Sweattodge 8 mins

Mike Stubbs (with Man Act) (UK) 1991

Tunic 5 mins

Tony Oursler Sonic Youth (USA) 1990

Record Players 4 mins
Christian Marclay (FR) 1991

Topic 2 5 mins
Pascal Baes (FR) 1990

Ear To The Ground 5 mins

John Sanborn Mary Perlllo 1986

Ecco Homo Promo 10 mins
John Maybury (UK) 1986

She's Mad A mins
David Byrne (USA) 1992

Curated by Steven Bode of Film and Video
Umbrella

Student Programmes
One and Two

Programme One
Sheffield Media Show 93
on Tour

The Sheffield Media Show is a maior
showcase for new work by emerging
artists and students from Media Art
Courses throughout this country and
Europe This year work was specially
commissioned for Ihe show, includ-
ing performances and installations.
A central theme to the show was a
symposium entitled Incisions
considering the body in relation to
time based art This programme
reflects the variety of programme
themes which ranges from 20 minute
narrative films to 40 second
animated computer sequences.

Programme Two

Contemporary student work from a
selection of Art Colleges and
Universities across the UK which
encourage innovative and creative
approaches to new media With work
still in progress for assessments and
degree shows, this programme
promises the very latest and hottest-
off-the-editing-suite selection of
student work offering an exciting and
diverse range of formal styles and
contentious issues.

Curated by Rebecca Owen ana Shelfield
Media Show.

The Passing

54 mins

Bill Viola (USA) 1991

Bill Viola s extraordinary new piece,
The Passing is arguably the most
important video work of the last few
years. Startling, lyrical, profound and
powerfully, authentically moving, it
is, In many ways, the perfect
expression of Viola's artistic vision.
Full of spectral visual phenomena
and impressions from the edges of
consciousness. The Passing inhabits
a penumbral world between dream
and reality; between waking and
sleep. Throughout the tape Viola's
unquiet slumbers are interrupted by
surging, primal memories; and then
when brought sharply awake, by
intimations of mortality. These
fleeting thoughts are brought more
clearly into focus via the footage of
Viola's family and, in turn, connected
up to the passage of the generations
and the ceaseless cycle of birth and
death. Viola's imagery more than
matches his themes: disclosing a
haunting black-and-white world of
almosl hallucinatory velvet beauty
Rarely, if ever, has video been so
visionary in its mood, so poetic in its
language and so powerful in its
emotional impact

White Homeland
Commando

63 mins

Elizabeth LeCompte (1991) USA

For over fifteen years, the ensemble
of New York-based artists known as
the Wooster Group (whose
members number Jim Clayburgh
Willem Dafoe Spalding Gray
Elizabeth LeCompte Peyton
Smith Kate Valk, and Ron Vawter)
have created a series of theatre
works that are both televisual and
Iheatrical in scope.

These works deploy film, video,
music, dance and written text in a
collage form that is heavily
dependent on outside media
elements and amplified sound for
the way they are shaped on stage.
White Homeland Commando is the
group's first full-length video piece
conceived completely outside of a
live performance. It revolves around
the infiltration of a white supremacisl
organisation by a special unit of the
police and is constructed in a
challenging cross-cutting style in
which Ihe complex inter-connected
plot-lines are developed alongside
more familiar TV thriller conventions
Powerful, provocative and starkly
compelling. White Homeland
Commando is a highly original and
impressive work that makes one look
forward to further Wooster Group
video productions

Liquid TV

A cannibalistic house named
Thomas hangs out with a housing
inspector who's out to close him
down. Two all-American kids, Billy
and Bobby, get their kicks playing
'frog' base ball. Uncle Louis is
endlessly flushed down the same
toilet A woman visits a public toilet

and ponders on the subtleties of
cubicle etiquette. And, Doktor Zum
proves that archeological excavation
may |ust be a nice name for search
and destroy. Welcome to Liquid TV.

Liquid TV is constantly moving. It
flows into areas the rest of us
thought were too 'politically
incorrect' to touch Simply put. this is
not talking head animation Liquid TV
defies traditional narrative structures
in favour of a formal that mixes
humour with abstract ideas and
experimental formats in a formidable
cocktail to produce what can only be
described as animation with
attitude '

This programme of progressive
animation was originally screened on
American MTV and includes both
American and British animation.

The programme includes new
animation from award-winning
animator Candy Guard and Stick
Figure Theatre Whilst Bobby and
Billy provide an on-going saga in the
form of Party, Winter Sports and
Soap-Box Derby Other improbable
titles include; Elvis Meets the Spider
People from Hell, Dog Boy, Beavis
and Butt-Head.

Curated by Eddie Berg, Steven Bode and
Irene Kollarz.

Wax, or the Discovery of
Television among the
Bees

85 mins

David Blair (USA) 1991
(16mm/video)

Over six years in the making, David
Blair's Wax or the Discovery of
Television among the Bees is
experimental film-making at its most
ambitious and inventive, and a
fascinating pointer to the way in
which new electronic technology is
impacting on film and video work.
Blair's hero, Jacob Maker, is an
operative at a US military base in the
Alamogordo Desert (the birthplace
of the Plutonium bomb). Jacob
spends his days working on the
design of high-tech weapons
systems, until an interest in bee-
keeping inherited from his father

(William Burroughs) leads him to
discover a sinister secret pattern
unfolding that he is unable to evade
Told in an oblique visual style that
combines archive material with
brilliantly-integrated virtual reality
and computer graphic sequences.
Wax is a highly original tour-de-force
that offers an intriguing glimpse of
the electronic cinema' of the future.

What You See is What You
Get

Programmes One and Two

What You See Is What You Get
explores the changing image of
politicians in today's increasingly
media-dominated age. Featuring a
diverse selection of material from
Britain, the United States and the
former USSR, the programme
illustrates ways in which political
figures (and their advisors) use the
media to present carefully-controlled
images of themselves. It also reveals
how today's electronic technology
can cut through the illusion to show
politicians' unintended, often
unflattering moments.

Highlights of over two hours' worth of
material include extracts from the
American cult movie Feed, which
features covertly-captured satellite
footage of Presidential candidates

Clinton. Bush and Perot in a series of
off-guard on-camera moments In the
midst of the campaign trail. Other
recent examples of scratch-style
video pieces from 'media hackers' in
Britain and the USA show alongside
a selection of party political
broadcasts from both sides of the
Atlantic, while a number of longer
pieces analyse the phenomenon of
the modern media politician, notably
the remarkable TV Boris and Video
Misha, which cleverly dissects the
contrasting profiles of Yeltsin and
Gorbachev at the time of the Soviet
coup

Programme One:

Perfect Leader 5 mins
Max Almy (USA) 1982

Feed (extracts) 10 mins

Kevin Rafferty James Ridgeway

Death Valley Days (Secret Love) 5 mins
Gorilla Tapes (UK) 1984

Tory Stories 5 mins
Peter Savage (UK) 1992

Blue Monday A mins
Duvet Brothers (UK) 1984

Hack Pack on the Road 1 mins

Late Show pre-election items (UK) 1992

We Will Rock You 2 mins

Emergency Broadcast Network (USA)

1992

US Campaign Commercials 1950's -
I990's 1 mins

Compiled by Marshall Reese/Antonio
Muntadas

Party Political Broadcasts 1 mins

(incl: Kinnock - The Movie and John Major

- The Journey)

Programme Two:

TV Boris and Video Misha 43 mins

Akos Szilagyi/Peter Gyorgy (Hungary)

1992

Zygosis 26 mins

Gavin HodgeTim Morrison (UK) 1991

references as diverse as Sappho.
Aleister Crowley, Susie Orbach
(author of. 'Far is a Feminist Issue").
'Nature' and S&M.

Annie Sprinkle is a consummate
artist, Post Porn modernist, Sex
Goddess of Manhattan, porn-star
turned performance and video
maker. This programme includes the
results of her last workshop for
women, the enlightening 52 minute
videotape. The Sluts and Goddesses
Video Workshop or How To Be a
Goddess in 101 Easy Steps (1992)
co-directed with experimental New
York film-maker Maria Beatty More
than a document, this hilarious and
visually stunning video is a liberating
journey into women's sexual and
spiritual pleasure.

The Leap (No Leap) 20 mins
Aklko Hada (Ger) 1993

World Premiere

The Sluts and Goc/desses Video Workshop
or How To Be a Goddess in 101 Easy
Steps 52 mins
Annie Sprinkle/Maria Beatty (USA) 1992

result of an investigation by the
Obscene Publications Squad named
'Operation Spanner'. All of the
'offences' occurred with the full
consent of the participants and in
private. In December 1992. the
Spanner case went before the
House of Lords on appeal and the
results are imminent

This international programme of
videos questions the role of the body
and sexual freedom in contemporary
culture. These are videos that
enquire into issues of gender,
identity, sexuality, state control of our
desires, dread of sex and AIDS

Featuring:

Pars Pro Toto 13 mins
Veit-Lup (GER) 1991

A Spy (Hester Reeves Does the Doors) 5 mins
Suzie Silver (USA) 1992

My Body is a Metaphor 8 mins
Stacey Frledrich (Can) 1991

Anthem 10 mins
Marlon Riggs(USA)

When I Grow Up I Want To Be Beautiful G mins
Franko B. (ITALY) 1993

British Premiere

Curated by Kathleen Maitland-Carter in
association with London Video Access

Curated by Steven Bode of Film and Video
Umbrella.

Curated by Kathleen Maitland-Carter in
association with London Video Access

Sexual Visionaries
Programme One

Sluts and Goddesses

Sexual Visionaries
Programme Two

Illegal Love Bites

In The Leap (No Leap), Akiko Hada
presents us with a beautifully
executed piece of work about the
struggle for a young woman to exert
control over her own body in a
culture that denies its power. With

'People must sometimes be
protected from themselves', Judge
Rant, the Spanner Trials In 1990,
sixteen gay men were convicted of
consensual sex practice (eleven of
whom were charged with 'assault'
and given prison sentences) as a

Performances

Epitaph

Bluecoal Arts Centre

Robin Blackledge (UK)

If you would indeed behold the spirit
of Death, open your heart wide unto
the body of life For Life and Death are
one, even as the river and the sea are
one... For what Is it to die but to stand
naked in the wind and to melt into the
sun?' Kahil Gibran. (The Prophet).

A fusion of stylised performance, con-
ceptual theatre and video posturing as
2D moving image. This installation,
which incorporates performance and
audience viewing areas, challenges
traditional modes of viewing con-
ceptual theatre by physically defining
the audience's field of vision. A parallel
can be made between this definition of
space in theatre terms and the
focussing of space used in telvision,
the Cathode Ray nipple" which sup-
plements real life experience Perhaps
that for a great proportion of us, TV
has become synonymous with the
need to conform and suppress our
individuality, a 'secondary reality'
which creates dialogue with our own
perceptions of 'truth'. The choreo-
graphy in the piece uses these con-
cepts as treatment within a visual poem
that deals with the omnipresent fear of
mortality.

Epitaph is a rendering of our final
moment of existence and our
imagination of what lies beyond. The
compression of one's life into a milli-
second, and the expansion of this
millisecond into eternity.

Performers: Robin Blackledge Chris
Curran Julienne Lorz Helen Parker
and Liam Scott Soundtrack by Bruce
Douglas Bill Curwen

"The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy

Funded by New Collaborations/Arts
Council of Great Britain and North
West Arts Board.

How to Act Better

Bluecoat Arts Centre

Annie Griffin (USA)

Annie Griffin makes her debut in
Liverpool with a camera, a
cameraman and a company of
artistes for an evening of 'basic
strategy' for the performer.

How to Act Better is a practical look
at the ancient profession of
pretending to be someone else in
public, combined with the mysteries
of the screen actor's love affair with
the lens. With the help of
cameraman Pete Coley. Annie lets
us in on a few secrets of the stage
and screen How to Act Better also
features three of Annie's favourite
young actors, Will Brook Eliot
Giuralarocca and Oliver Senton

Prior to the VIDEO POSITIVE festival,
Annie Griffin will spend three days at
The Tate Gallery Liverpool, working
with local artists and actors to create
a 'Performance in the Guise of a
Guided Tour at The Tate'. Some of
these performers will also feature In
How to Act Better at The Bluecoat.

Annie Griffin is a London-based
artists who makes devised work for
the stage and screen Recent
productions include Almost
Persuaded about a country love
song. Shaker on the lite of the
founder of a celibate sect. Skylark, a
stage show with 5 short films and
Headpieces, a series of short films
for MTV

A South Bank Centre commission,
touring with the aid of The Old
Museum Centre. Belfast, VIDEO
POSITIVE, Bluecoat and Tate
Gallery Liverpool. Contemporary
Archives Festival. Nottingham and
Tramway. Glasgow

The Last Broadcast

Near Salthouse Dock Quay

Solid State Opera (UK)

The 'death ray' is no longer the
figment of a science fiction writer's
imagination. It is here to stay, all
about us in our world: unseen,
unheard and largely unregulated.
Radio waves are a bigger threat to
mankind than nuclear weapons, the
ozone factor and just about every
other ecological threat put together
There is no place on earth that
escapes the radio wave and yet we
still have no answer to the
devastating effects of the X ray, the
gamma ray or micro wave, and as
scientists push forward towards their
obsession for ever higher and
potentially more dangerous
frequencies, we innocently
contribute to this global disaster by
insisting on more satellite
communications, broadcasting
freedom, microwave tele-systems,
with the Utopian promise of earth as
a global village.

An acceleration towards total radio
chaos seems unstoppable as we
enshroud the globe in an
unpenetrable mesh of radio activity,
its suffocating and frazzling effect
generation an era of magnetic
storms and cosmic noise, and where
human life will disintegrate for ever
One day, the only evidence of
mankind will be in its electronic
image.

The Last Broadcast is in three acts:
Life, Half-life and After-life.

Supported by the New
Collaborations Fund/ACGB and
sponsored by Owen Brown Tents for
Events Ltd